Learning to breathe, learning to live.

Living is breathing. When we come out of the womb our heart is already beating ,
but until we take our first breath we are not truly alive.

Once outside, life is in a fragile, dependent state. Even in adulthood, we are never
self sufficient. Take water away and we don’t last more than days. Take air away
and we don’t last more than minutes. Breathing is most natural, and at the same
time our first line of defense against a hostile environment that will kill us if we’re
not careful.

We don’t live in constant fear, of course. Most of the time we inhale and exhale
without thinking about it, with an inherent trust that when it is time to take the next
breath, air will be available. We don’t store it, we don’t doubt it. But do we really
“breathe easy?”

What would it be like to trust mother nature. Not only for every breath we take, but
for every move we make.

Would our actual breathing change? How many of us try to control life with our
shallow breathing? As if being uptight gave us that control.

As if holding on very tight to the pilot’s wheel of a propeller plane, while learning to
fly it, would make it fly more securely. That thing is made for flying. It is not helped
by our effort to hang on to it. No matter how strenuous it might be.

Do we let our belly expand fully with every breath we take? And if we do that, do
we allow the air to also fill our chest? And does our belly deflate naturally while
expelling air all the way from our lungs?

I remember receiving a gift, exactly 50 years ago, of a book called Hara, the vital
center of man. Hara is perhaps known in the West because we’ve heard of Hara
Kiri. But the solar plexus is recognized in different ways as a center of power by all
the ancient cultures from the East.

In martial arts, and in spiritual practices, you project your power from there. You
have to learn how. As is the case when learning to fly, we tend to try to defend
ourselves from the power enveloping us, instead of accepting that we are placed
in its midst, and projecting our own power to work with it. We could say to become
one with it, at the risk of sounding too poetic to some.
It took me exactly 50 years to finally understand that, a week ago. To finally get
that I wasn’t breathing easy—that I was defending from nature, instead of taking
the opportunity of projecting my energy out and merging with her every time I
would breathe in.

What a lovely dance we are offered, if we entrust our life to her. It is much better,
more blissful, more empowering than defending from nature. While trying to
preserve individual power, separate from her, we loose it.

And that is a terrible waste of one’s miraculous breath in this wonderful life.

Benjamín Feldman
Aug 1, 2021

Go Fiona!