Breathing Practice

My teacher, Diane Long, says it's important to have a breathing practice. From time to time she asks earnestly "Do you have a practice?" I answer, truthfully, "yes". But the practice is very different from the one I had previously. What Diane asks me to do is nothing like the classical pranayama I studied before. No fancy techniques, no retention, no ratios. For years I didn't get the point of it. Now I look at it more as an enquiry to truly understand breathing and the breath. It's hard! It would be so much easier to follow a technique and impose upon the breath and the lungs. My breathing practice has been frustrating because the mind keeps getting in the way. As I try to watch the breath and the body they change to conform to how my mind intellectually understands breathing from studies of A & P. And I know all the A & P of breathing! I was always rather good at that, even as a child when it was required learning for the LAMDA examinations I took. And sometimes when Diane is describing what she feels is happening I feel myself silently resisting - No, it's not like that!

At other times my mind sneers "You call this a practice? When you were doing 45+ minutes a day and using ratios with retention that was a practice".

And when the despair squid is around the mind says "You'll never get it. You're wasting your time. Give up now". (Actually the mind is half right. I'll never get it because there is nothing to get but it's not a waste of time.)

Then in my practice a few days ago the mind took the morning off and I got a glimpse which took my intuitive understanding of the breath a quantum leap forward. It felt that at the end of the in breath that the diaphragm was already beginning to move upwards and at the end of the out breath it was beginning to move downwards. It's best expressed by a question. Where does the breath in begin? (can also be asked as where does the breath out end or where does the breath in end and the breath out begin?) My A & P understanding is linear because that's how the intellect works. But the breathing didn't feel linear. It felt cyclical like the seasons. In the same way as where the year begins is an arbitrary point so it is with the breath. There really is no start or end. It feels that the beginning of the exhalation is in the end of the inhalation and vice versa. Rather like the Yin and Yang. The concept of in and out breath only seems to have meaning if you fragment what you are looking at - what happens in the nose, the throat, the diaphragm etc. When you feel the whole there seems to be subtle overlapping and the idea of in breath and out breath as separate becomes as ridiculous as the idea of a New Year being anything more than a convenience for measuring the passing of linear time. And some of Diane's descriptions don't seem so wrong after all.

Now I have to be watchful that I don't slip into the trap of the body and breath conforming to what I think I understand!