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4/6/06

The Pause Between Breaths

Our bodies are about 50% water. What feels pretty solid to us – a mass of muscle, bone, and flesh – actually moves with a fluidity that mirrors the waves of the ocean coming in to shore and receding again to join the depths. This rhythm or pulse belongs to all things, governing and guiding the cycles of our lives. From the grand scheme of life between conception and death, to the second-by-second passage of blood traveling through our veins with each heartbeat, everything we are can be described as a pulsation between complementary forces.

Call it expansion and contraction, movement and stillness, work and rest, separation and connection, light and dark, being and doing, forgetting and remembering; it is all a matter of moving between one thing and another, at times in the extremes, occasionally perfectly balanced in the center, most often somewhere in-between.

When life is relatively quiet, going well and smoothly, it’s easier to be aware and accepting of the ebb and flow of the contrasting natures of reality. When times are challenging, when there’s turmoil, confusion, or fear, the first thing to go is our equanimity with that quality of fluctuation.

In the face of difficulty, we can quickly lose our sense of feeling grounded and centered. Have you ever noticed that when you get stressed or upset, your breathing gets shallow, fast, or even almost non-existent? And that when things calm down again, suddenly you find yourself taking a deep breath in, and maybe letting it out with a big sigh?

The breath is our connection with the pulse of life that continues despite external circumstances. Regardless of our emotional state, the breath is a constant. When we forget to breathe, something bigger than us breathes for us, until we reconnect on our own with the essential movement of the breath.

To find the rhythm of your body, breath, and life, you must go beneath your habitual responses, beneath your usual thought meanderings. When you do this, you will begin to notice the deeper pulsation, and, even more valuable, the space between pulses.

Try this practice to find the pause between breaths. Get comfortable, and tune into the movement of your breath. With the in-breath, feel your body expanding, filling, moving outward. With the out-breath, your body contracts, empties, turns inward; this is the return journey, where consciousness moves inward to reach back to the core.

Breathe like this for a couple minutes, paying attention to the feeling of your body expanding and contracting. Watch the cadence of your breath, the balanced rhythmic flow of air moving in, and out, and in again. Don’t force it to be a certain speed or depth, just observe it effortlessly entering and leaving your body. Notice that you don’t have to do anything to breathe, you can simply relax and let it happen.

Now, at the end of the next exhalation, can you feel the slight pause that comes before the next breath comes in? This pause is a gap in time, a moment out of time, a moment of timelessness. In this lull, nothing is happening, and nothing needs to be done. Allow yourself to rest in the stillness. Out of this quiet, the new breath arises. Into this quiet, the breath dissolves.

This pause, this place of restfulness and peace, is always available to us. When we’re tired, overwhelmed, anxious, or afraid, we can turn back to the movement of the breath. From the steadiness of this flow, we can reconnect with the pause between breaths, where stillness resides and we come back to the heart and substance of our own being.

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