Breathing

Eat­ing is a com­mon sub­sti­tute for breath­ing deeply — espe­cially in our anxiety-laden world. It is a rather civ­i­lized sub­sti­tute. We sup­press our gasps and our urges to yell at the TV with a mouth­ful of choco­late cake. This par­tic­u­lar era of great anx­i­ety was pre­dicted a cen­tury and a half ago by one of my favorite Euro­pean philoso­phers — Soren Kierkegaard. Anx­i­ety is dif­fer­ent than fear. Fear is spe­cific and arises from real out­side threats. Anx­i­ety is gen­er­al­ized and arises from within. If you are a sophis­ti­cated soul, you will learn great things from your inner anx­i­eties — far more than you learn from your fears. Anx­i­eties are not han­dled like fears. They are more sub­tle. They also carry won­drous lessons with them. Fight­ing them with will power can lead you to a full-blown anx­i­ety attack, for our deeper self is so much greater than our con­trol ego. In the war against our self, we always lose. Our anx­i­eties are try­ing to tell us some­thing that can­not be ignored.

Breathe! Your anx­i­eties are most likely to come upon you when you are com­fort­able — after you have accom­plished a life goal. Do what you did best upon arriv­ing in this world. Breathe! It is sim­ple. It is the fastest way to calm your­self. If you grew up being fright­ened or emo­tion­ally smoth­ered, you may have to be espe­cially dili­gent in get­ting to your most basic trust­ing state. “Relax” is a com­monly heard term, but it has no power out­side of sim­ply breath­ing.

Our most ancient the­o­log­i­cal terms have to do with breath­ing. “God breathed the breath of life into man…” or the “Spirit” (breath) of God “hov­ered over the waters” of cre­ation. God said, “Let there be light” (the voice only works with the breath). Jesus breathes over the dis­ci­ples and tells them to “receive the Holy Spirit” (lit­er­ally “the sacred wind or breath”). The ancients con­sid­ered air/breath as the essence of and metaphor for the Per­son and actions of God. It is prob­a­bly the most basic thing to grasp — this side of rec­og­niz­ing Deity itself.

Breathe! It is far cheaper than eat­ing. Every cell in your body needs oxy­gen more than it needs imme­di­ate food. You can go for days with­out food but only a very few min­utes with­out air. Breath­ing is more basic. It also tells the psy­che that all is well. You need that peace every wak­ing and sleep­ing minute you are on this planet. Attend to your breath­ing. It will calm you and lead you to some very deep wisdom.