My Lovesong, My Lungsong

At the risk of sounding like I’m regurgitating a guided meditation (although what is so wrong with that?) I will stray away from beginning this string of thoughts by saying something like, “control your breath, control your life,” or “inhale lots of love in, exhale lots of love out,” both of which (learned from guided movement leaders) have become mantras in my daily life. But I guess I did just start with them, which I think I’m okay with. 

But yes, breath. That’s where I’d like to begin. And frankly, end. And really, acknowledge as we take each step in between. 

Breathing is step one. Bare minimum. And not to mention, undeniably involuntary. And before this year, I don’t think I really gave breathing a second thought.

I had always heard that to calm down, you can pay attention to your breath. I think maybe I had tried that out from time to time. But my old pal called My Breath and I really weren’t so well acquainted. I noticed her like, once every couple of years when I walked up a flight of stairs or freaked out about something, but other than that I was pretty much bff’s with the classics: My Mind (yikes), every once in a while My Body (when I wasn’t busy picking her apart), and occasionally, if I was super lucky and in tune with things, My Heart (which, when set to the right frequency, I would later find out to be a sort of sister to My Breath.)

Over the summer, I started running for the first time in my life. Sure, before that there was the annual grade school mile-run in gym class. There was also the feeble attempt in my late teens to jog around my neighborhood when I started speaking unkindly to the aforementioned My Body. Those, of course, were unsustainable due to the lack of purpose and general goodness behind their intentions. 

This time, it was different. I wanted to really be in My Body and see where she could take me (physically, mentally, spiritually.) This time, I said hello to someone I didn’t know too well, even though she had been there since the exact moment I entered this world, covered in blood and guts and screaming for dear life. Her name was My Breath and she’s one cool-calm-collected gal (calm and present in the face of a screaming and frenzied me — be it newborn or adult.)

So, back to the running. It became clear to me very early on in this process that the reason I created the storyline that “I can’t run” was because I was giving zero regard to the way I was using my long-lost, calm-cool-collected friend. I wasn’t thinking about how I was breathing. The moment I controlled my breath, slowed it down, used it as a metronome for the movement of my legs, my arms, the thud of my feet against the earth — that was the exact moment I realized that I could, in fact, run. 

There were a lot of other things that changed after I became better acquainted with my breathing — my old gal pal. Yoga, cardio workouts, mediation, walking down the street, falling asleep peacefully at night. It was like my friend, My Breath, was the key to unlocking a new world, including many of the things that I had written off as just “not for me.”

So, as I said, a lot of things happened in the summer of 2020. And a lot of them had an eerily obvious common thread. 

It was the summer the globe was shut down because of a virus that largely affects the respiratory system — a virus that has taken the lives of many, leaving insurmountable grief in its wake.

It was the summer a social movement exploded after yet another black man was killed at the hands of the police while gasping the words, “I can’t breathe.”

It was the summer that ALS took my Godmother’s life, ultimately suffocating her after the neurodegenerative disease rapidly attacked her nerve cells — leaving the most energized woman I know reduced to sitting in a chair, unable to breathe.

I put together the pieces of this haunting puzzle as I turned the corner of my parent’s street on my mid-June afternoon jog — tears streaming down my face, lungs filling and emptying.

The summer of 2020 was not subtle (or gentle) in its attempts to point me to the importance of breath. And so I learned to breathe. I learned that My Breath is my life. My Breath is Me.

My yoga practice has taught me that maybe, just maybe, another way to think about the spirit of who I am, the heart that beats within me, the essence of my being — is breath. I am alive. My heart is beating. I am a breathing thing. And sometimes, (all the time) that is enough. 

Strip away the doing, the working, the achieving, the making, the wanting, the thinking, the spinning. All that’s left is the being. All there is, is the slow rise and fall of the chest. The rhythmic pulsing of the heart. 

This important year of quiet solitude, of unemployment and mediation, has given me the unique and invaluable gift of knowing that I could be doing literally nothing, and I am still a perfect and worthy being. Being. Not a perfect and worthy doing. I am not a human doing. I am a human being who breathes and recognizes herself as being alive in a beautiful and tragic world.

I am not the first nor the last person to think about this. In fact, I feel a little silly that it has basically taken me 26 years to pay attention to the fact that my lungs and heart have been operating for every single second of my life.

This world is consistently inconsistent. We can rely on literally nothing to stay the same. Obviously, those around us. The circumstances of our lives, time itself. But even our own selves? Can we rely on that to stay constant? Far from it. 

Did you know that in the timeframe of seven years, all the cells in your body are replaced with new ones? That basically means that we are becoming completely and entirely new people every seven years of our lives, down to the very cells that make us up (not to mention the things we do, what we care about, music we listen to, people we meet, etc. etc.) 

The body’s cells regenerate. The thoughts shift from second to second. The heart wants what the heart wants and what the heart wants changes by the time it finds its very next beat.

Breath, however, is always here. There is not a moment it leaves us. It is the intimate, quiet, secret love song that our beings create for us. The soundtrack that plays behind the ever-changing, chaotic windstorm we call our lives. 

I don’t know much. And I can’t say I’ve done much of anything in the last year that I can knit together into a quilted wisdom or philosophy. I have very little to show for a year of life in terms of achievement, work or deed. 

But what I can say is that this year, I learned how to breathe. I listened to my lung song more this year than I ever have in my (hopefully) quarter-of-a-life. And to me, learning this song, listening to it, humming along — has given me a new way of looking at myself. And it has meant everything.

So let those cells shift, baby! Let the thoughts roll away in the wind! Let the heart want and let it break and let it go when the time is right. Join me in the beautiful release. But know that I am here, sitting with My Breath. I am spending more time with her and I’m learning to pay less mind to the changes. I let go a little more, and I am a tiny bit more free.

And if you need me — maybe, just maybe — you’ll find me strolling around with a little extra pep in my step, whistling along to the song that I’ve learned is me.