Breathing is an especially fun thing. Especially on the inner
playground. Inner-playgroundwise, breathing is just about the mother
of all rides. Breathing can get you so high that purportedly perfect
peace awaits you for doing nothing else but.
Listen to yourself breathe for a minute or day or year or two.
Listen to your self breathe.
You, the listener, you the breather.
Listen to yourself breathe without disturbing yourself.
Breathing in exactly as much as you would if you weren't paying
attention.
Breathing out. Noticing, but not controlling.
Noticing for example the moments between, when the in-breath becomes
the out, the inhale the ex.
Noticing the sound wash through you, the hushed ushering of the
air entering, exiting.
It's like being on a see saw with yourself. Your breathing body
on one end. Your noticing mind on the other.
You see yourself up. You see yourself down. You get all the way
down and see the other of you get to be all the way up. You and
yourself get off on each other
And as you teeter-totter yourselves up and down, breath by breath,
you and yourself, one body, one mind, seeing and sawing in time
with the moving breath, getting high off each other.
Chris Newham comments:
At about 8pm I was lying in an MRI machine. If you never experienced
this, the most notable aspects of the experience are that for half
an hour, during which time one is told to remain perfectly still,
one is confined to the space equivalent to the inside of a coffin
and bombarded with loud, deep, discordant noice/vibration. A couple
of years ago, when I first endured this, I happened to be tired
and easily fell asleep for the full thirty minutes. This time I
was very much awake and decided to focus on my breath. Then I remembered
the teeter-totter breathing inner game. Initially each time I breathed
in I rose on the see-saw and conversely when I exhaled. I couldn't
seperate myself into observing, let alone being the counterweight
to the breathing self until I was interupted by the technician's
voice when he told me through a loudpspeaker he was moving from
one scan series to another. When I got back to my breathing, there
the breathing self on the other end going up with the outbreath
and down with the inbreath inversely to my observing self.I tried
to get back into being the breather but could not. I re-experienced
the optical illusions (the old/young lady, for example) in which,
when the alternative view is described, that becomes the dominant
view. This was novel enough that I was quite reluctant, when the
technician told me the scans were complete, to move from my now
very comfortable space. |
