BREATHING AS ONE – A Meditation Greenhorn’s Epiphany

Ages ago Sally and I took a community-ed meditation class. About all I remember is something our instructor called a “cleansing breath.” And that I enjoyed some of his guided meditations.

So I’m far from a sophisticated meditator, but with that modest intro I’ve devised my own technique which works just fine. It helps me relax and keep things in perspective during these nightmarish times.

 

I usually start a session by watching the “shape” of my breathing—visualizing it not as two distinct movements—in, stop, out, stop—but as one continuous, elliptical cycle.

Once that rhythm is set I picture the inhalations bringing in good stuff, like positive energy, light, abundance, healing… and the exhalations expelling all the bad stuff: negativity, darkness, scarcity and illness/pain. It’s kind of like a pump…or better a conveyor belt; you grab things you want as it winds in, and dump your trash on it as it heads back out.

     All time, past and future, has swirled together
     into this little present-moment eddy.

A PRESENT-MOMENT EDDY
During this morning’s meditation I experienced something remarkable. I’d just gotten my breathing down when, suddenly, the space it occupied grew from arm’s-length scale to cosmic.

One second, I’m thinking of myself and my own respiration; the next, I have this profound sense that somehow my breath is commingling with other breaths, those of loved ones and ancestors, strangers on the other side of the world, and anyone who’s ever entered this sublime, out-of-body dimension.

I drift off magically through space and time, feeling deeply that everything under creation is connected, in me and of me. And that all time, past and future, has swirled together into this little present-moment eddy.

It’s not that I’ve never had this sense before, but usually it’s been more a fleeting glimpse, not there long enough to make the leap from the  intellectual to the emotional. This time it does though; it feels so powerful, so very real.

Curiously, as my soul soars like this, I’ve never felt more grounded, more centered.

A SILVER LINING
One of my fondest wishes during the pandemic and the other convulsions wracking our poor planet has been that something good will come of it all. Something transformational about how we treat each other and our precious planet.

If it were nothing else, I’d settle for a very deep, broad, cross-cultural sense that we’re all—we and all of Nature’s miracles—connected as one. And a contagion of empathy.

I think that connection is what I experienced this morning. I hope I can let it percolate through me, flavoring not just my rarefied reveries, but all my comings and goings.

And I pray it might find the light of day, too, in you and in everyone, everywhere…and soon.