no superstition in the breath

Sometimes when I meditate

there is nothing left of me

but the breath

all the rest of me inseparable

from all the rest of you.

There is no superstition in the breath

only in the mind and body surrounding.

The mind and body are suspicious,

full of fables and myths;

but there is no superstition in the breath.

With each exhalation

wordless sensation migrates

from the nostrils to the belly and back again

brings water to the fields,

brings breath down the cord from mother to child,

brings blood to the sacrifice of love and war,

brings bright offerings to the temple;

sings into the dark,

assuring the aspirant bent in the shadow

the breath that never ends,

whether dropped to our knees below the cross,

or easy in the slippers of the Beloved,

and certainly behind the diamond brow,

sighs the sigh heard 'round the world.

That famous ten percent we are supposed 

to have use of our brain seems true

of the rest of the body and mind as well.

We occupy very little of ourselves

A few percent perhaps...

We barely inhabit the breath

living in the shallows of our life.

Our ordinary breath hollowed by fear and anger,

lost behind the nostrils somewhere near the heart,

lost somewhere between the back of the cave 

and to top of Jacob's ladder...our cells

are starving for breath.

The breath does not lie.

It has nothing to say

It simply is

overflowing with sensation

met crossing the bright field

inviting the body and the rest of the mind

to enter subtle as the breath

subtler levels of being...

The fable of each inhalation, like the first

firing of the imagination (full of the superstition of "I")

and animating the body; that first inhalation

still being drawn...

And last exhalation suspended in myth

begun to be expelled soon after birth.

Taking each breath as if it were the last,

before we enter the enormity at the center

of each breath.

Though superstition surrounds the first breath

and is rarely discarded even with the last,

these two breaths - separated by joyful swoons

and plaintive cries - come together in the great silence,

the bitter tears before and after

the great peace between breaths

when mind slows to wisdom and the body

knows itself, as T. S. Eliot nearly says,

for the very first time.

The wise man, the flying woman, dwells

in the space between breaths as faint echoes

drop over the edge and fade into

the vast chasm of silence.

Letting go at the end of each out-breath

stills the enormity.

Occasionally in the meditation hall my breath

nearly stopped.  I needed nothing more 

as thought stilled, and the wind-blown mind

settled.  As the drum stopped.

Breath and fear surrendered.

"If the breath never returns

the universe will breath for me."

Overcoming the distrust, not holding

to the last breath or grasping at the next.

Letting go completely of control of the breath.

Trusting a breath unshaped by pretense

or superstition, a breath that breaths itself

from the oceanic tides between planets ...

a breath like the one before

the one that created the universe,

that began thought, and forgot

its original face.

~Stephen Levine

from Breaking the Drought

photo by Diane Varner