Health Beyond Civilization

The importance of rooting in the body can’t be understated. All of the methods I’ve described to establish a baseline of body and health awareness are not only to gather data, but to acquaint one’s own consciousness with the lived experience of inhabiting and using a body and being a physically alive being in the corporeal world. For civilized people this is a simple and fundamental thing that’s nevertheless very easily overlooked. The ease with which many of us get basic physical survival needs met, and the ease with which we can dissociate into altered states thanks to the abundance of music, television, movies, etc. in our lives, tends to enhance the illusion that we are, physically, just machines whose functioning needs to be maintained. But the closer we get to our biological, animal selves, the more it expands into a living complexity.

Living as we do in such ease, surrounded by the marvels of modern technology sustaining our lives, it can seem like chaos to descend into corporeality. It can feel unfamiliar, crazy, like there are too many details to manage, and that it would be so much easier just to let those details be, and return to the realm of the gods where food comes from boxes and love from a television screen. In such apparent chaos, more refined methods and strategies have to be used in order to maintain balance in our descent into embodiment.

In fact, often the methods and strategies that work best are those that take advantage of the natural things the body does to maintain balance — the cycles, rhythms, actions and responses that occur naturally in the body.

The simplest and most obvious of these, and therefore one of the most emphasized in older practices of yoga and qigong, is the breath.

We can live for weeks without food and days without water, but we would be hard-pressed to live for more than a few minutes without air. Taking a breath at birth is the first thing we do that marks our successful entry into this world, and it’s one of the last things that marks our death. We breathe endlessly throughout our whole lives, with so much repetition that the breath may seem to become virtually meaningless.

Mainstream Western medicine has become all backwards, focusing so tremendously on pharmaceuticals that require millions of dollars of research to manufacture, then secondarily on exercises that often require hundreds of dollars of equipment to do, then peripherally on diet. Quality of water, environment, relationships are lost. Breath? Don’t even think about it.

But it’s precisely because it’s both so crucial and so common and repetitive that it can be one of the most powerful things to access. You eat a few times a day, you drink several more times per day. You breathe several times a minute. It’s a cycle that’s directly accessible since it sits right inside your chest and influences your entire body on a moment-to-moment basis.

Now, there are a lot of different authorities with a lot of different opinions on how to breathe, depending on their goals and their philosophy. At this point I won’t detail any of them specifically; rather, I’ll just state that working with your breath can be an important basic strategy towards training your health. Why is that? Because breath is such a bridge between the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual, and thus enjoys a unique central position among all of these factors that influence physical health.

We’ve already discussed how important breathing is to staying alive, minute by minute. However, most people will agree that it’s not sufficient to survival. You need to drink, you need to eat. Among these things, breathing is the most ephemeral, the “lightest” in terms of density.

Esoterically, those things that are heaviest in terms of weight or density, or whatever you want to call it, are those things that are more rooted in the material world. So, often people who feel agitated or are “freaking out” will eat food to calm themselves down — and it can work, because food has a “denser” vibration. Accordingly, food is most related to the physical functioning of the body. Certainly if you’re upset, it can disrupt digestion, especially for sensitive persons; but for the most part, your body digests without quite as much regard to what you’re thinking or feeling in the moment.

Breathing is different. While crucial to life, it’s also an exquisite meter of how you’re feeling emotionally, and where your mind’s concentration is. Because it changes every moment, it’s responsive to your functioning in every moment. Thus, the least little stress can tighten your chest, make your breathing more shallow and more rapid, even if in only minute amounts.

A natural and relaxed awareness of the breath can serve as a gauge of your functioning on all levels. And once you know how you’re doing, you can begin to adjust that functioning. And this, too, is part of the beauty of the breath: It works both ways. It’s a gauge, yes, but by consciously controlling the breath, you can begin to send the influence in the opposite direction. So it is that by slowing and deepening the breath, you can slow and relax your mind and emotions, you can calm down your heartbeat and influence the rest of your body.

But I think the breath is, in most people, a skittish thing. I recommend that you start working with it simply by becoming aware of it, specifically without trying to change it. It’s like becoming acquainted with a wary animal; if you want to train it, you can’t start by telling it what to do. You have to approach it with respect and understanding of how it is naturally. Developing a relationship will automatically bring you more into accord and that will open the door to greater influence and a more harmonious and expanded relationship with self, with body, as well as with the surrounding environment which is, after all, the origin of the air we breathe.

All of these things are possibilities through the gateway of the breath.