Extra Credit Sankalpa: Breathing at the Speed of Life
“Arriving”
Observation is a practice that reveals
Subtle beauty that is right in front of you.
Sit and watch something for a minute,
Set a timer if it helps,
and watch how much work it takes
to watch something.
Your eyes want to stare at a point,
Soften your focus a little,
See the object and the space it’s in,
Watch the subtleties of it’s movements,
Like a tree branch lightly bowing in the wind,
Insects moving across it so naturally,
one.
This work prepares you to watch
The pulsation of your breath.
It moves within you
As naturally as the bugs moved across the leaves,
one.
Focus and re-focus,
Play with the interaction of
observation and the
inevitable manipulation—
Like a see saw,
Let the weight of the kid
On the other end
move you—
This is the play
Of watching your breath,
Always unfinished
Until
Breath awareness meditation is not just about the breath, it’s also about your awareness. Most of our day is spent in a very low level of awareness, identifying with the objects of our awareness more than our awareness itself. In Shiva Sutra 3.3 we are told that those “who are unable to grasp undifferentiated knowledge” which means those who are more focused on differentiated reality, the objects of your awareness, “live in” that world of differentiation. The Tantrasadbhava goes on to describe this experience like being ‘an animal trapped in a fence’, the more it struggles the more ensnared it becomes. When we meditate on our breath we are not just trying to perceive the breath, we are using the breath as a vehicle to perceive our own Inner Self, described in the Sutras as “undifferentiated Knowledge”, knowledge of our non-difference from Shiva.
The breath is a pulsation of reality, a physical manifestation of the pulsation of spanda that creates and dissolves the world around us constantly. It is always in motion and is always subtlety changing it’s shape so to speak. To focus on the breath is to maintain awareness of reality throughout these constant changes, neither “accepting nor rejecting” any particular manifestation, yet whole heartedly staying present with it.
To prepare to watch the breath you can observe things in nature as they live their life. A plant moving in the wind, ants crawling on a rock, your dog sniffing the air, a gecko observing it’s surroundings— you know, those kinds of things. Try not to get pulled into any particular aspect of the scene, or even relate to it from the mind through story telling— just keep watching it like a scene. You find that the fence you were caught in was not outside of you, but your own mind. And only through waiting in this way can it begin to dissolve. Watching the breath is a process of un-grasping it, un-gripping it, in order that we may experience the energetic flow of which it is a part.
This is not an experience that we can ‘will’ into being. As the Sutras tell us, this experience is an ‘emerging’, a ‘spontaneous recognition’ known as Grace that we can only prepare to receive. In his Exposition to Sutra 1.7, Jai Deva Singh writes,
“it is not reality that can be produced by our effort, by any Yogic discipline or technique. If it were to be produced, it would no longer be eternal. It cannot be ordered about. Then why all this pother about gaining the turya consciousness? What is the value of the upayas or Yogic disciplines mentioned in the Siva-Sutras? The answer is that though it remains as the background of all we are and do, we are unaware of it. It is not a feature of our normal consciousness. The upayas are mentioned so that we may prepare ourselves for its reception.”
You could say we don’t practice to achieve, we practice to receive.
Today I was listening to a Martin Luther King speech. He preached about the all too common reality that we don’t always arrive at our destination when we plan to. Most of us gauge our experience of a practice on whether or not we reach our perceived destination, the experience we expect at the end of the session— but this is a mistake that leads to suffering. MLK said that the only thing we can perceive is the content of our hearts, and that we should place our attention there in order to ascertain our progress. Are you on the right path to your destination? There might not be mile markers, or signs to mark the way, but if you check in with your heart you’ll know. Working with the breath can be alot like that— it takes time, it takes effort over time, it’s operating at a different time signature from our minds— all we can do is keep trying to feel it, and hold our focus there, allowing the experience to arrive in us.
I’d love to hear if this benefited your practice 🙏🏾
Namaste,
Satyam