Slowing down and re-connecting with our bodies begins as a lonely, scary voyage into the unknown. We tend to feel safe in our prescribed patterning – carrying out the fixed roles we have been given. But we grow older and those roles become too small – too limited. The time comes to let go of old, worn-out ways and find our connection to the greater whole.
Much of our conditoning is lodged in the way we hold our breath. When we let go and allow our breath to flow freely in our body, physically sensing its rhythm without control or direction, we drop into a deeper place, a place not dominated by an endless stream of shoulds and should nots. When our mind stills and our body softens we become one with the slow, steady movement of our breath… more in sinc with Mother Nature and her processes.
There is a profound ebb and flow in creation that we are connected to at a cellular level. The same primeval tidal rhythms that nurtured our ancestors in some distant epoch have left a faint imprint on the biorhythms of our own bodies. In re-aligning with the natural rhythm of our breath, we can sense the pulse that reverberates in all that lives.
In the words of the poet Tagore……
The same stream of life that runs through my veins runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measure…It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean cradle of birth and death, in ebb and flow.
Breath is both the vehicle and the teaching itself. Each inhale is an act of creation, a bringing forth; each exhale a letting go, a surrender. There is a small death every time we release a breath and new life invariably follows with the next inhale.
Our breath teaches us that life rises from its own absence, that birth and death exist within each other….and that the flow of creation contains them both.
Truth is as near to us as the air we breathe. With patience – and practice – we can, through the ebb and flow of our breathing, loosen our grip on old patterns and fixations and reach for a deeper experience. When our mind stills, our body calibrates with the rhythms and tides of the natural world.
We are an integral part of an eternal cycle …. and we express this truth in every breath we take.
Deborah
Deborah Hill is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and Group Facilitator in Sonoma, California.