Essential Practice: Befriending the Breath

Connecting with Life's Vital Flow

I’ve been creating my own list of essential practices that cultivate steadiness and peace, even amid the many challenges of life. This third practice invites us to foster a deeper experience with the breath and the vital flow it carries. Befriending the breath, in many beautiful ways, can lead us to befriend the whole wide world.

Could we ask for a more constant companion than the breath? Could we ask for a more faithful friend and a more patient teacher? Could we ask for a more devoted guide to lead us outward toward the world and inward toward our truest self?

The breath is the source and the flow of our lives. It is the bridge between inner and outer, self and other, beginning and end.

The breath is always with us, tethering our small lives to the vast world. It fuels us with our body's most essential food, keeping us moving and singing and sighing through life. It anchors us to the present moment. And it guides us, patiently and peacefully, to worlds within and worlds beyond.

Here's an amazement: The breath works its magic whether or not we pay attention to it. We are born with a reflex that keeps our lungs expanding and contracting. Somehow our bodies know just how to make this miracle happen. Some deep and magnificent impulse keeps us tethered to this fragile life by pumping our bodies with life-giving breath.

And still, the breath is perfectly happy to be shaped to fit the needs and moods of the day. Inhale deeply and infuse the body with energy. Exhale a sigh of relief and downshift the nerves toward ease. Concentrate awareness on the breath and let the mind be steadied and soothed. In this way, the breath works faithfully to smooth out the day's wrinkles, infusing us with both vitality and ease.

Here is another amazement: The breath has the power guide us toward refined and subtle energies within. It can lead us from the outer world of action to the inner world of spirit. It can serve as a portal toward the deep flow of vitality that pours through our inmost nooks and crannies, keeping us alive.

In this way, the breath guides us toward a deeper understanding of the energy that fuels our small bodies and also the greater world. It offers us communion with that invisible force that keeps the whole world spinning along.

Breath pours in, filling us with vitality and light. And then breath slips out, offering stillness and surrender. Another wave of breath pours in, massaging every cell, and we bloom open. And the breath spills away again, and we are invited to peacefully yield.

Let's befriend the breath’s rhythms, its textures, its moods. Let's be amazed by how very quiet the world grows - how easy and sweet - when we finally learn to float amid its flow of rise and fall and rest and then rise and fall and rest again. Let's let the breath guide us into the very heart of life.

Patiently, faithfully, the breath reveals to us all we need to know. It returns us home to the here and now. It guides us toward that greater ocean of energy that fuels the world. As our sharper edges melt away in the breath's rhythms, an awareness of a deep connection to all of life grows.

We breathe. The world breathes. We shine. The world shines. The membranes that separate our small selves from the big soul of the world grow thinner and thinner, until eventually they dissolve completely. We keep going until - using our inhalations and exhalations as our guide - we find our way back home.