begin here
Where the ground is cold and frozen in many parts of the northern hemisphere, the kinetic stir of life whirs underground. Seed tendrils curl upon themselves with imperceptible breath; critters and crawlers slowly decompose plant matter, making the very ground upon which we stand; fibril roots and mycelia finger their way through the fecund earth, perceiving and reaching towards each other. The rivers underground swell, there is a particular pressure-building of this time of year. Aboveground it is barely noticeable, the only perception may be our own growing restlessness in response to feeling the sub-terrestrial vibrations of preparation, of creating the conditions for new life of spring. There is almost a sucking down of our attention, root binding to stabilize our agility and ability to rise and expand. Always upon us is the energy of change. We are in a pre-liminal state, where death has occurred and where the preparation for birth is growing, but yet to arrive. It is the energy of waiting, a slow, ever-shifting plasma of recursive evolution that requires our trust and patience.
Soon, we will find ourselves upon the doorstep of this crossover time, threshold space, spring. But now is where we wrestle with meeting our last cravings for rest and resisting it as the same time. We feel eager to “get on with it”, of bypassing this necessary pivot where there is a momentary pause. I often hear, and I have often experienced, the fear of becoming lost in our rest - going too far down, into exhaustion, into grief, into detachment. On some somatic sense, we understand that we are in fact finding ourselves at the bottom of the seasonal exhale, the out-breath of the long night. The gesture of this season is that we are out of breath and will need to breathe soon to survive. Commonly, this is where we meet emotions like depression, apathy, hopelessness, despair - the opposite of inspiration, connection and joy. Expiration, as in expire, or death, is what we’ve been taught to avoid, so we fear going into the dark because we don’t want to get lost in the shadows, especially in a society built on metastasis - corruptive expansion, extraction, growth and production. But learning to sit in the dark is really important. Regulating our breath, our nervous system and protecting our energy is powerful; reclaiming our agency is radical. The key is that we’re not supposed to go it alone (that’s where I come in, this is where community comes in, and where our well-being takes priority).
In big ways and small, this is the time to explore what has needed to expire, what we can no longer support with our breath. When we meet this discomfort we also meet our impulse to breathe again. [Try it, take a long deep inhale, then slowly extend your exhale, empty yourself of breath, and wait. See what happens to your body. Feel the urge to breathe again, to give into the primal desire for the lungs to accept breath, to give ourselves over to being breathed.] What our bodies instinctually crave is to swing between the two states of exhalation and inhalation. To die and to be reborn, with a pause for rest at the pivots. We crave to stretch out and unfurl our tired corporeal earth suits into full release of letting go, and then to be met again by breath, by inspiration and coming into form with an inborn impulse for movement. When we allow ourselves to go the full range in one direction we can be met by the balancing impulse for the opposite. But if we hover in the middle, not devoting ourselves to either direction, we create a static state where everything stills - our emotions, our bodies, our minds get stuck, and we simultaneously fear and crave where the breath naturally wishes to bring us - which is back into ourselves. Breath guides us into our bodies’ sensations, emotions and perceptions which tell us a lot about what is going on, inside and around us. Breath is our mentor, teaches us how to turn inspiration into movement, in accordance with seasonal timelines.
And, many of us have to re-learn how to breathe. Our origin story and our last moments are bookended by our first and last breaths, but a lot of story and social-environmental impact happens in between. Like the folded pleats of bark on a tree, our breath patterns us, it narrates back to us how life has imprinted our body and nervous system. I am keen on sensing into this with you, and it is my life’s work to assist breath back into the crevassed and subtle spaces of your body.
