Breathing

I wanted to focus on breath and reciprocity for my last environmental reflection, so I chose to do a variation of a breath-visualization meditation I originally learned in high school but have run into a couple times since then. The original focuses on feeling your breath go in and through your body, usually downward area by area, and the version I prefer starts with that process of feeling the energy be produced and move through to the edges of one's body, then moves outward to visualizing the incoming sources of one's breath, and also visualizing one's own breath as almost a dispersive speech bubble reintegrating with the received wind. 

The main thing I noticed going inward was the way a body supports itself, I could feel my shoulders and elbows passively working to hold my arms and forearms, and my legs and waist bearing the weight and holding by back and torso in place. As I move outward, I try to visualize the wind moving close to the ground and being held near it, while the wind off the ground is fast and loose, not being pulled but thrown around by the cars and physical bodies it hits, the fences and streets it forces itself through reconfiguring its shape and power. My breath seems small, a minor pocket pulling the air and pushing out its complement. When I exhale, the surface area of my breath seems to spread out till it's indistinguishable with the whole that takes it back, I wonder if what I breathe is at all my breath, how much is the breath of others, how much a translation of that breath, how many times its been translated back and forth between different actors, but it seems insubstantial trying to originate or make-partial the gestalt dimension of ecological relationships, that symbiogenesis and biosynthesis always produces more effects than we could ever predict or fully account for. 



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