Breath: What Is It That We Can Learn From This Moment-To-Moment Experience?
It Rises And It Falls
Another way of learning to be present with the breath is by paying attention to the rising and falling movements of the abdomen while breathing in and breathing out. As we sit in silence and in stillness, all the other bodily movements are minimized or intentionally put on hold for a period of time, except for the movement of breath that naturally keeps happening, with or without our permission. In this setup, how the air comes into and out of the body is more noticeable and this simple process has a lot to teach us as we stay open to the experience and observe it attentively. Breathing in, one notes that the belly is expanding; breathing out, one notes that the belly is contracting. But what exactly is it that we can learn from this moment-to-moment experience?
Embrace and enjoy each moment
Each moment, things in this world are being created and being destroyed over and over again in a spontaneously cyclical fashion. Even on a daily basis with our human body, billions of cells in many different organs that were alive yesterday have died and have been replaced with new cells today; these cells are going to die again soon too and more new ones are coming after. There is something sad about seeing our existence in the world this way but at the same time, there is something liberating about it as well. It is sad because we know everything always comes to an end; it is liberating because it can teach us not to hold onto things but enjoy and embrace the freshness of each and every moment of our lives while they last. Just like the movement of breath, life goes on with or without our permission; there is nothing we can do to stop it. What we can do though with consistent practice is to stay effectively open and attentively present with the uniqueness of each and every moment no matter how difficult or joyful they are.
Happiness and sadness – and everything else in between
If I can add a personal note here, the happiest moment of my life was the night when my daughter was born. I‘ve had a preview of the overflowing of my emotions already when I heard her heartbeat for the first time even months before she was born. But that night, when I saw and held her for the first time in my arms, I was ecstatic. On the flip side, the sadness I’ve felt the most in my life was when I had to say goodbye (although I knew it was temporary) to my parents and my younger brother at the airport leaving my home country Burma to come to the US for college about 13 years ago. Not to add a more dramatic tone to it but my heart definitely ached and I cried. But looking back, both the happiest and the saddest moments of my life are both equally to be embraced and enjoyed. Just like we can be like with our breaths, if we are open and stay fully present with the moment-to-moment experience, we end up making the best out of any kind of experiences in life because we get to know who we truly are at the core. And as the cliché goes, “the joy is in the journey, not in the destination.”
Non-attached Immersion
The more we sit in silence and in stillness, observe our breaths as our anchor, the more we realize each breath is unique and that there are many different kinds of breaths each moment – shallow or deep, short or long, smooth or coarse, pleasant or unpleasant, satisfying or unsatisfying, and the list goes on infinitum. What we eventually learn too is that no breath is personal no matter what kind of breath it is. By that, what I mean is – that when we observe a shallow breath and we immediately judge it to be unsatisfying, we are more than likely being unrealistic and taking it too personally. After all, in the grand scheme of things, each breath, from the very first moment we were born into the world to all the way until the final moment of our life right before passing on, whether shallow or deep, each inhalation and exhalation does not fail to keep us alive. And as we fully immerse ourselves into this aliveness, we go through rises and falls in life without taking them too personally. Things do rise and fall but we do not need to rise with them or fall with them because we learn through our practice that the nature of life intrinsically is always gonna be in flux, while the true observer remains non-attached and anchored.
