Every Breath You Take
In a single day, human beings take somewhere between seventeen-and-thirty-thousand breaths.
In the United States, the current life expectancy is about 77 years – equivalent to 28,105 days.
This means, in a lifetime, a person will take, on the low end, about 477, 785, 000 breaths; on the high end, that number is over 843 million, with the potential to exceed a billion breaths, should someone be lucky enough to live into their eighties or nineties – or if they practice yoga.
While often taken for granted, the sheer volume of the respiratory system is, in a word, astronomical.
…and yet the Police’s frontman was arrogant enough to sing that he could and would watch “every breath you take,” which is not only deeply unsettling, but patently ridiculous: while a talented musician, it’s clear Sting is not very good at math.
So far as yoga and meditation are concerned, though, the question is not how many breaths we take in a lifetime, but rather, how many of those breaths we’re aware of, which if we’re honest, is not many: if you’ve ever sat to meditate (which Sting has) you know that the intention to focus on the breath erodes almost as soon as its set. In virtually no time, our scattered, erratic thinking shifts away from the breath in favor of anything else: plans for the rest of the day, the growing to-do list for the weekend, the last time we had a teeth cleaning, that thing we wish we hadn’t said in that meeting, what the members of O-Town are doing nowadays, whether our lives have any lasting meaning in the grand scheme of the universe, what happened to that kid from our hallway freshman year, where we left that thing we can’t seem to find, and if any of this sitting still and breathing is making a damn bit of difference.
…and when that happens, you simply start again.
Then, it happens again.
And you start again.
Then, it happens again.
And you start again.
This pattern continues in perpetuity, affecting all meditators every time they sit to practice. However, below the steam of internal busyness and never-ending mental chatter, the breath is always there, waiting.
Steadily and rhythmically, the breath fuels the organism, even when we’re not aware of it: regardless of what the mind is doing, the body continually breathes itself, and because of this, the breath is an ideal anchor point for yoga and meditation. By its very nature, the process of breathing can only ever take place in the present moment — we can’t catch up for breathing we forgot to do in days past or store up extra breath for the days ahead. The breath exists eternally in the now and, therefore, is an avenue we can always take back to the present moment.
Our minds, unfortunately, don’t share this ever-present quality, and research shows that the average human being only spends 53% percent of the time focused on what they’re doing in the present. The other 47% of the time is spent mind wandering, as we typically travel to the past and future, re-litigating events that have already happened or projecting "what ifs” about events that have yet to come.
As opposed to the mind, the breath is present 100% of the time, never straying or wandering from the here and now. It serves as an internal barometer, and before our minds even make sense of a situation, the breath has already responded, constricting in stress, deepening in ease, speeding up in anticipation, needing to be caught when we’re overexerted, and invisibly flowing back and forth in constant interchange with the trees and green that surround us as we move through the world.
There are lessons to be learned from the breath in virtually every moment, and to illuminate this, you can take a few full deep breaths wherever you are, and when you’re ready, fill the lungs and hold the breath.
Initially, this might feel good, but eventually, a tipping point will be reached where holding the breath becomes more and more uncomfortable. We see here that clinging — that is, holding on to something impermanent — is a recipe for discomfort, pain, even distress.
This is the Buddha’s Second Noble Truth in action: “Attachment is the root of all suffering.”
The breath carries its own innate wisdom, in part, because it belongs to both the world of body and to the world of spirit: it hugs the line between the physical and the invisible, the tangible and the intangible, as it exists in time, but less so in space. We can certainly feel the breath physically, but it does not have perceptible mass, a shape we can see, or a capacity we can hold. In that way, the breath is quite different from virtually all other phenomena with which we most often interact.
Conversely, our bodies exist in time and space, by their very nature, tangible; our thoughts exist in time, but not space, and are, therefore, intangible; our breath, however, is invisible, but physical: while not taking up space, it’s ever-present, always able to be felt either internally or by placing a hand on the stomach or chest in any given moment.
You can’t always see it, but there is always proof of the breath's presence, and due to this dualistic and perhaps paradoxical nature, it’s no wonder that the breath is at the heart of many of the world’s faith, mystic, and wisdom traditions: Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh says that “breath is the bridge that connects our life to consciousness,” and the Sufi poet Rumi writes that “There is one way of breathing that is shameful and restricted, then, there’s another way: a breath of love that takes you all the way to infinity.” One of the eight limbs of yoga is pranayama -- a focus on the breath, its patterns, and controlled breathing exercises -- with prana meaning “life force” and yama meaning “control.” In practice, we emphasize this through ujjayi.
This yogic idea extends even further, however, as some contend that the breath’s life force goes beyond the individual practitioner and comes to animate all living things.
According to the American Franscican priest, scholar, and author Richard Rohr, the Hebrew word for God -- YHWH -- is one that cannot ever be accurately spoken, only breathed. Rohr writes:
“The Jews did not speak God’s name, but breathed it with an open mouth and throat…Many are convinced that its correct pronunciation is an attempt to replicate and imitate the very sound of inhalation and exhalation. Inhale—yah; exhale—weh.
The one thing we do every moment is therefore to speak the name of God. This makes it our first and last word as we enter and leave the world. For some years now, I have taught this to contemplative groups in many countries, and it changes peoples’ faith and prayer lives in substantial ways. I remind people that there is no Islamic, Christian, or Jewish way of breathing. There is no American, African, or Asian way of breathing. There is no rich or poor way of breathing. The playing field is utterly leveled. The air of the earth is one and the same air, and this divine wind ‘blows where it will’ (John 3:8) -- which appears to be everywhere. No one and no religion can control spirit. When considered in this way, God is suddenly as available and accessible as the very thing we all do constantly -- breathe…and isn’t it wonderful that breath, wind, spirit, and air are precisely nothing -- and yet everything?”
Rob Bell, Author of What is the Bible?
This idea is built upon by pastor and New York Times Bestselling Author Rob Bell in his book What is the Bible? where he focuses on the Greek word pneó:
“Pneó. You’ll find this Greek word lurking in a number of English words having to do with breathing, like pneumonia, an illness related to breathing, and pneumatic. Pneó is related to the Greek word, pneuma, which means to breathe and also…spirit.
You’ll find this dual meaning in lots of languages, from Hebrew (ruach) to Latin (spire) – the word for breath being the same word as the word for spirit. To expire is what happens when the life of something leaves it; to be inspired is to be breathed into.
We’re all breathed into.
In the opening chapter of the book of Genesis, there’s a beautiful picture of God taking the dust of the ground and breathing into it the breath of life.
Which leads us to you.
You are made of skin and bones and blood and hair and brain cells. These different parts of you comprise your physicality, your body – your tangible, material essence.
And yet that’s not all that makes you, you.
You also have a spirit, a soul, consciousness, thoughts…
There is the tangible dimension to your existence – skin and bones and wood and rocks and dirt and light – and then there is the intangible dimension to your existence – love and hope and spirit and longing.
Life is a blend of the two.
Without spirit, you only have physical, lifeless elements; without the physical and material, you only have disembodied ideas. What is love without the embrace of another? What is hope without an actual heart that fills with hope in time and space?
If you’ve ever been in a room with someone who is about to die, you know exactly what I’m talking about. The person is there, their body lying on the bed, their breath labored and slow, and yet you can sense that something is leaving them. Something you can’t see, can’t touch, can’t measure in a lab, and yet it’s something vital and essential to them being alive.
Can you see why in so many languages the word for spirit and breath is the same?
From early on we humans have had the awareness that your breath is intimately tied to your existence. You stop breathing, you die. Your breath is both a physical reality that can be measured and detected and also a picture of an unseen reality that animates and sustains your existence at the deepest levels of your being.
If you’re alive, you’re breathing.
You’ve also been breathed into by the divine.
When we talk about the spirit of something, then, what we’re naming is the reality of whatever it is that transcends its physicality. People talk about the spirit of a place, a team, a home, a person – we often refer to the quality and character of something in ways that can’t be measured by any tangible means.
Take a song, for example. Certain pieces of music move us in unique and powerful ways, and the word we often use is inspiring. What do we mean by this? We mean that the song is chords and notes and sounds and harmony and volume and all those physical, tangible elements, and yet there is something else to the song, something beyond its material essence, that speaks to us.
It breathed into you something good, hopeful, true, comforting, healing, or genuine.”
In a modern world where mindfulness is often separated from spirit and marketed as a tool of focus and productivity, the breath can feel monotonous at times — a dry, sterile anchor point to concentrate upon. Without proper consideration, it simply becomes a means to an end: the breath is utilized for the purpose of achieving all the benefits that are supposed to come after meditation, as opposed to something worth meditating on, in and of itself.
Taken only as a concentration tool, the breath doesn’t seem likely to advance us on the path or deepen our spiritual life. We may ask, “How does focusing on the breath make a meaningful change? How does this lead me to awakening?”
Understood properly, awakening has less to do with focusing on the breath, and more to do with honoring the breath, respecting the breath, recognizing the breath as already having its own spirit and innate worthiness.
The breath is the physical manifestation of soul, that which animates life, and when we understand the breath in this way — in the way the world’s mystics have tried to make us see for millennia — what seems like the simplest act is elevated to the level of spirit. There is the possibility for every breath to become Godly and soulful, which turns out is the road map: the thing we’ve been seeking is right here, as close to as the air in our lungs. Breath for breath’s sake; life feeding into itself moment after moment.
Like all things, the breath is impermanent. But it’s also infinite: it’s both the oxygen coming in and the carbon dioxide going out, and it’s the process beyond the elements in the lungs, which is ever-present, everywhere, always, and allows for life itself to happen.
The breath is that which our existence relies upon, and as a teacher in Nepal once told me, “This life is so precious, it hinges on a single breath. Air comes in, air goes out, and though we think we know that the next breath will come, we can never be certain. So we must be grateful for every moment, because we never know when we exhale if it will come back in or if it will be our last.”
So, yes: you’ve already breathed an untold amount of times in this lifetime, and odds are that you’ll take hundreds of millions more breaths before its all said and done.
But none of those have or will ever really matter.
Because the most important breath is the present one: that is the breath on which this life hinges.
And of the seventeen-to-thirty-thousand that will pass through this body today, let the breath happening right now be the one that gets your attention.