The Spirit of Breath
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In many languages, the word for breath is the same as the word for soul or spirit.
We can find traces of this in the English word for the action of breathing — respiration. Hidden in the word is the idea that with every breath we are being re-spirited.
You can bring this into focus if you consider the space after exhaling as a kind of liminal space between life and death. In that moment, you’re hanging in the balance until, magically, you breathe in and are once again filled with life. This action continues right up until your last breath, which is always an exhale. Until then, something deep within beyond your conscious mind keeps choosing life.
We all begin life with an in-breath, our inspiration. We end life with an out-breath, our expiration.
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The Link Between Breath, Spirit & Emotion
Notice that when you are stressed, anxious, fearful or angry there’s an unconscious constriction of the breath. When we’re in these states the breath becomes very shallow or it stops all together. When we hold the breath, we hold onto the emotion. When we hold onto the emotion it has a way of possessing us.
If we look through the eyes of our ancestors and understand breath as spirit, it gives us another way of relating to our emotions. When we understand the breath as spirit, then powerful emotional states can be seen as a kind of spiritual entity — capable of taking us over, of possessing us.
This might be a strange idea in a world where we tend to view emotions through a materialist scientific lens and understand them as complex neurological chemical processes, but we still have an intuitive sense of the old ways of knowing. It’s hidden in plain sight, embedded in the way we speak.
We don’t say, “I’m having an extreme serotonin response”, or “I’m being flooded with cortisol right now”. We say things like, “I was overcome by emotion”, “He was filled with rage” or, “I don’t know what came over me”.
Intuitively, we still see emotions as mysterious forces that are capable of taking us over and making us do things we wouldn’t normally do when we’re “in our right mind”.
When someone excuses their behavior by saying “I couldn’t help it, I was angry”, they’re not totally wrong. In that moment, they allowed the anger to completely take them over.
That’s not to say that we should demonize emotions. Emotions are a natural response to life, but as the word suggests, they are moving and motivating energies. E-motions = energy in motion. Emotions only become a problem when we hold onto them and restrict their movement.
No wonder we get “depressed” when we stuff our emotions down — we’re deep-pressing them.
We think we can choose which emotions to avoid but it doesn’t work that way. Avoiding or numbing the so-called negative emotions also depresses the so-called positive emotions, because emotions aren’t really “good” or “bad”, they’re all simply different energies.
When you cut yourself off from one emotion, you cut yourself off from all of them.
It’s like cutting the power line outside your house when you want to turn off the stove because the water is boiling over — everything goes dark.
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The Opposite of Depression is Expression
Notice that the release and relief of these emotional energies occurs when we sigh, scream, sing, shout or sob — all of which happen on the exhalation, or ex-spiration. In cultures where the old ways haven’t been lost, you’ll find many different embodied methods to express emotional energy and regular opportunities to do so through ritual and ceremony.
In our modern culture where it’s become taboo to express powerful emotions, we bottle them up like a genie in a lamp — where they continue to draw power and energy until they explode out when we least expect it, or when we’ve found a container in which we can safely release them. It’s no wonder that in shamanic ceremonies it’s usually the most reserved, quiet and polite folks who end up screaming, crying, laughing and moaning with utter abandon throughout the night.
We are, as psychotherapist, poet and activist Miriam Greenspan notes, an emotion-phobic culture. We almost have no choice but to remove ourselves from the culture completely in order to fully feel and express our emotions. People pay thousands of dollars to go to faraway retreat centers just for the opportunity to “let it all out” without fear of judgment. Therapy is also a container where it can feel safe to express emotion, but both of these options cost money that a lot of people don’t have.
I think the best solution is to relearn how to work with emotions as in-the-body energies and avoid the trap of over-thinking them and trying to manage them with mental exercises and mantras.
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Breathing Exorcises
When we start paying attention to our breath we can see (and feel) the connection between our breath and our emotional state. What becomes clear is that there’s a direct correlation between how deeply we’re breathing, and how deeply we’re living.
When the breath is constricted, there’s a corresponding emotional constriction that keeps us from connecting with others or worse, causes us to act out in a way that harms others. Taking some deep breaths (particularly long exhalations) helps to release the constriction, or we might say, allows the spirit to express.
When we make deep, conscious breathing a daily exercise — especially when paired with whole body movement — it allows us to release what we we’ve been holding onto. It relieves the energy’s urge to move and motivate. It refreshes and restores our natural state of openness that enables us to receive what life has to offer.
It’s interesting that the Latin roots of the word exercise, ex-arcere, can be read as “to keep away” — which sounds a lot like what we mean by a similar word: exorcise. You might start to think of your breathing practice as a kind of spiritual-emotional cleanse, an exorcism rather than simply exercise.
Looking more deeply into our everyday language can give us a new perspective on something that many of us take for granted — like the simple act of breathing — and see it as something quite profound and meaningful.
Similarly, looking more deeply into our experience of the breath and learning to work with it consciously empowers us with a kind of secret knowledge that in turn, becomes a resource we can draw on in our everyday life. To breathe more fully so we can feel more fully, live more fully and love more fully.
Inhale, receive. Exhale, release. Repeat.
