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Guided Meditation: Air Element

Good morning. The first couple of days I hadn't figured out outside my range how to see the chat that people are sharing that are on the YouTube stream, and I have to say that I can see it. I can't read it all while I'm talking, but I can see it, and it's quite lovely. I can feel the sangha that's spread all over, and it's quite beautiful. I realize there are many of you that have this as your regular practice, that you're committed to being here every day. I just want to celebrate that with you, that this has been made possible, sort of one of the gifts that's come out of these very difficult recent times.

So, beginning today with air, we've talked about earth and water and fire, and now moving on to include air. This last year has been particularly poignant, the year and a half really, around air. We've gained so much understanding about how connected we are, and it's come through our awareness of breath. Last summer with George Floyd and the "I can't breathe," and how deeply we were all affected by that—and rightly so—and how that phrase got us right where we live and where we die, and raised consciousness in a huge way, in a way that was really good.

And in the midst of that, we have COVID, which has made us so aware of how connected we all are by breath. This thing, this virus that is carried on the breath, has traveled the entire world. It's sort of a terrible and yet clarifying unfolding of how clearly our breath is intimately connected to everyone. You can't be left out of this.

And then again in another way with the smoke. When the smoke from the California fires reaches all the way to the East Coast, it's like, "Oh right, the air we breathe, it moves everywhere." So there's something so intimate about this, and sometimes challenging; I want to acknowledge that part too. But the breath, we start our practice with our breath. That's where we begin, and there's so much in that. There's so much potency available if we start to connect with this universal breath that we all share.

So we'll begin our practice. I'll offer a poem to start, and I'll offer a few different ways to connect with this element of air.

Beginning with a poem as you're settling into your meditation spot, finding your ground. This is from Danna Faulds^[1], Walk Slowly:

It only takes a reminder to breathe, a moment to be still, and just like that, something in me settles, softens, makes space for imperfection. The harsh voice of judgment drops to a whisper and I remember again that life isn't a relay race, that we will all cross the finish line, that waking up to life is what we were born for. As many times as I forget, catch myself charging forward without even knowing where I'm going, that many times I can make the choice to stop, to breathe, and be, and walk slowly into the mystery.

So as you settle into your posture, feeling your connection with the ground... Feel the pressure of your buttocks on the chair, the cushion. Feel your feet in contact with the ground. Allow yourself to feel the spine rising up, and then the muscles softening, responding to the pull of gravity. Softening in the shoulders. Letting the eyes soften.

Allow yourself to tune in a little bit to the place where you are, recognizing that even if you're in a building, just outside there are trees. There are plants, there are other beings. Allow yourself to feel how these other beings—just acknowledging perhaps conceptually, and then just sensing it a little—that these other beings are breathing. That the trees are breathing; they breathe out carbon dioxide and breathe in oxygen. The algae of the ocean are breathing in great quantities. The deep forests, the tropical forests, the boreal forests, all breathing. And as we breathe in, we breathe with them. The breath is carried on the wind through the air, spreading everywhere.

And as you breathe, feel this breath as it comes into your body, through this open door of the throat. Feel the breath in the area of the diaphragm, the solar plexus, as it comes in and fills you here.

As you breathe in, let the breath be felt in the lower belly. Sense it from the inside: the world coming in through the throat, all this breathing coming right into your lower belly. Just notice. You don't need to change the breath to feel it there; just notice that you can feel it.

Let yourself feel the breath all the way to the base of the body, in the perineum, into the joints of the hips. It'll become subtler there, but it's still affected. We can still sense the breath here. Perhaps noticing that you can feel it even along the back, along the lower lumbar and the sacrum.

Notice if you can have even some sense that the breath flows down your legs. The slight ripple of movement. We know that, in fact, the breath, the oxygen, is being transported through our blood down to every cell, but can you sense it? Just the subtle energetic movement of breath flowing down into your legs. Perhaps you can tell partway down your legs, or fully, whatever you can feel or sense. This nourishment of breath.

Perhaps noticing the whole body from the waist down, that it's breathing. It's being breathed. No effort required.

Letting yourself sense up into the chest area. You can feel it most clearly to the front, but notice that you can feel the breath also along the back, the ribs expanding just a little. The breath along the sides of the ribs.

Then feeling the breath in the upper chest, both in the front and the back, under the whole region of the collarbone and shoulder girdle.

Feel the breath in the right shoulder. See if you can notice this sensation of breath traveling and including your right arm. Breath, nourishment, the molecules of the Amazon and the ocean algae breathing in, flowing down your arms.

And the left shoulder. Sometimes the shoulders, the body has to soften some to allow more of this sense of air to be filled and be nourished. Letting the breath flow down the left arm.

Feeling your body from the neck down, one full breathing body. The blessing of breath coming in and flowing to every corner, every cell.

And letting this sense of the breath fill your head as well. The neck filling, all the way through all your sinuses, filling your brain. Breath nourishing deep inside the skull.

Feeling the whole body breathing, being breathed. Aliveness.

Notice this air element may have some aspect of vibration or lightness. We can't see this air; we can see its effect. We can feel it move in the body.

You might notice that thoughts, when they come, are much like this element of air. They have this air quality: they appear ephemeral, cannot really be touched directly, and then they just drift away, disappear right back into the empty space they came from. Allow your thoughts to come and go like the air, drifting in and out like rustling leaves.

And as you breathe, you don't need to exclude anything. Sound comes through the air, sensations arise, thoughts come and go. All to be breathed in and allowed to breathe out.

Feeling the whole body breathing, and in those moments where we start to latch onto a thought, where we cling to something that's arisen, just notice that there's a constriction, a contraction. We lose contact with the fullness of the breath, and then we remember that we're being breathed, and we can rest in this breath, and the relaxation, the fullness, is available again.

Let yourself notice any coming and going.

Every cell in your body being awoken, alive with the breath of the world. This thin layer of air covering the surface. This living, alive breath that we share. You are part of it. You too are breathing, breathing with the whole world.

No inside, no outside, simply breath coming and going. Breath pervading your whole body, the space around you, inside each living being.

Rest and allow yourself to be held. Great sacred breath.

Nature as Teacher: Air Element

It's fun to realize that in spite of our distance and the spread and the way we just sort of appear—as I appear as a voice, and you maybe as typing or on Zoom as a box—we're all still breathing together. It's all still moving around.

And this breath is so important in our sangha—I mean, in our practice. And in our sangha! But in our practice, the Buddha started his instructions on the Four Foundations^[2] with: "Pay attention to the breath. Does it come in short? Does it come in long? How does it feel?" Many of us are very intimate with our breath. Sometimes our breath can be challenging and we can go to the places of constriction or places where it's difficult. I always appreciate the instruction to go to where there's ease and pleasure in the breath. Go to where you can find it.

This connection aspect of it is so interesting. We start with the breath, we are connected to it, and yet it has this insubstantiality... it's a doorway. It's starting to move into the mysterious. Earth is so here, solid, right there. And the water we can touch. Now, as we're moving towards the air, we're starting to move into this area of the mysterious. It's interesting, the word spirit in Greek was breath, wind, and that word turned into our Western languages into the word spirit. Anima comes from Latin: air, breath. To animate, animal.

This connection that has been there in our language is intuitively known by us: that the breath, the spirit, the animation, the aliveness are all so intimately connected. Let ourselves feel that. This animation that comes, this spirit. In some indigenous traditions, when they talk about the Great Spirit, that's the translation we get. They're talking, at least in the ones I know, the Diné^[3], they're speaking specifically to the wind, to the air. That is the spirit, the Great Spirit that connects.

The Diné say, that's the Navajo, they call themselves the Diné: "The wind within one is in no way autonomous, for it is in a continual process of interchange with the various winds that surround one, and indeed is entirely a part of the Holy Wind itself." That's a quote from David Abram's book, The Spell of the Sensuous, and he doesn't name the particular individual, so that's why I didn't say. This idea that the spirit is moving around, this aliveness, and coming into us.

And then adding to that, that our breath is our speech. When we speak, we are speaking with this sacred breath that comes out of us. What is our speech? This connection, this possibility, this opportunity for truth and beauty, and then how it gets distorted and confused. But we can come back, and this is often in spiritual traditions, and certainly in ours: singing and chanting are part of the tradition. We join our breath together in speaking and feeling the sacred.

There's a play here happening, I hope you can hear it, between the seen and the unseen that happens through the breath, through the wind. We see it all around us, you know, when the leaves move on the tree, we see the result of it. When the clouds move, we see this sort of wind, air made tangible for a moment, and then dissipating or being moved. We live in this world of breath.

In the body, as we feel it, and just as I talk, even keep noticing, see if you can feel your breath. Perhaps even the words that I'm saying, can you breathe them in? What is that like to let them come in and be felt in your body? To stay connected to this breath.

Breath has a lightness to it. In some ways you might say it's balancing with the earth element. It's often talked about in the Buddhist tradition as having the vibration quality, and I think of that as kind of this aliveness that we feel in us. You know, there's something that it's almost hard to pin down what it is, but when you feel into your body you can feel a certain aliveness here. This is the air element, as we recognize it right here in us.

As I mentioned in the meditation, thoughts are understood to be an expression of the air element. That makes sense, doesn't it? The way that thoughts just sort of appear out of nothing. They have this temporary quality, and then they disappear, dissipate into nothing once again. When we can understand and sense the way that thoughts are this air element, it can help us be less attached, less clinging to them as if they were solid. That's where we get in trouble, when we start believing that our thoughts are solid and real and the final word on everything, and instead recognizing, "Oh, they come and they go." Even the words that we say, they're sacred on one side, and in another way, they just disappear into nothing.

We're doing all of this in communion with the algae, the plants that breathe. A practice that I offer to you, something that I like to do, is I go out where there are trees or a plant, and I sit with it and I breathe with it. What is it to breathe with this other being that's so different in some ways than us, and yet it too is breathing? I started out very early on in high school being fascinated with plants and the stomata^[4] that are breathing. That's their breathing mechanism. And us too, we're all being breathed. Feel your breath, let yourself breathe.

I want to end with a poem from Rumi called In Every Breath:

In every breath, if you're the center of your own desires, you'll lose the grace of your beloved. But if in every breath you blow away your self-claim, the ecstasy of love will soon arrive. In every breath, if you're the center of your own thoughts, the sadness of autumn will fall on you. But if in every breath you strip naked just like a winter, the joy of spring will grow from within. All your patience comes from the push for gain of patience; let go of the effort and peace will arrive. All your unfulfilled desires are from your greed for gain of fulfillments; let go of them all and they will be sent as gifts. Fall in love with the agony of love, not the ecstasy, then the beloved will fall in love with you.

I want to offer today as a practice: allow yourself to feel the generosity of the world, of all the beings that are participating in this breath. The generosity of all the plants. As you breathe out, others breathe in. Feel it in your body right now. And whenever you remember today, not just your breath, but that you're breathing with no inside, no outside. All of us breathing together. Breathing, breathing alive, animated.

Thank you all.