Don’t Forget to Breathe

“In the quiet of the shadows…” —— well —— just last night I used an old trick I picked up just about 20 years ago.

I’ve used this for years and I felt like it was a little secret I had and having the little secret was what made it special and that it would lose its power for me if I knew other people knew or even that subconsciously it would spoil its magic for me.

But while thinking the inklings for this piece up, I can clearly see that this type of thinking is really the enemy of insight and teaching. 

And that there’s other cool stuff I know and this is not really a secret anyway - almost just a sort of personal ritual for myself that always seems to work when I can think clearly enough to make use of it.

I think I saw Joss Whedon’s Firefly TV series and movie Serenity in near real time with their release schedules, maybe missing a few weeks here and there.

It’s interesting to watch his newer DC career and inclusion of a lot of his old stars like Nathan Fillion - just drawing this connection here - I think he’s ok just giving away / selling some of his secrets and “personal truths” at this point

I am delaying and that’s part of my message.

There’s not much editing to my train of thought here and I want you to see it with me - a natural tendency. 

Don’t forget to breathe is a reference to a song by Alexi Murdoch, and my initial memory was that it was associated with a scene from the Firefly series or the subsequent film… but I looked it up and realize my memory is off - it’s from a later episode of the premiere of Stargate Universe - an episode of course called “Air”. 

In my memory now, without really knowing more than that my memory is off… and now reseeing the Stargate ships in my head having to slingshot through a star or something - it does make more sense. 

But my trick is to just sing some of the lyrics of the song in my head and think about calming down and slowing down my breathing. 

Part of the inspiration for this writing was a short YouTube piece I saw on the game “Chicory: A Colorful Tale” - I was thinking on how seamlessly the video hides its “thesis”/ subject because the subject really is the use of media / medium itself.

(Among other stuff) The piece was a really nice meditation on how sometimes we won’t ever measure up to the greats, but just being able to express and put it out there, even if just to be torn apart so you can go back and try again, or hide away and just enjoy for yourself, is ok and natural and something we can be comfortable with if we let ourselves (which in itself is hard).

There was an intro and conclusion on Andre 3000s piano jazz release and how it’s ok thst it’s not critically good.

After the needs are met. people just need space and time to be able to live and breathe and be.

how going at your own pace and enjoying creation for creation and not for some specific neuro scientific reasons or profit or something, can really provide you with a longer and healthier life.

So I sing the words of the first two verses and when I get it the first chorus I ensue im focusing on - something I learned when I was in middle / lower school from a teacher or family friend - breathing in properly. 

Properly is a slow long breath in through the nose, and then a slow long exhale. The timings are important, but more so the pace setting and repetition. 

If you’ve gotten your heart worked up, regulating your breathing will help bring it back down. 

Helps me mostly with anxiety or just helping slow down my thinking.

But what I’m delaying is the part I’m embarrassed about - I had forgotten how to breathe. 

For as long as I can remember back I had to concentrate to breathe through my nose, as if I was pulling in air from the tip of my nostrils, rather than the natural way I hope you have good control over; the nice deep breathe from the gut, that really feels more like pressure on your lungs being released and pulled down with the diaphragm. A long slow pull from the belly / diaphragm that even without really consciously doing breathing you can just do. 

It’s hard if you’re congested (which I am half the time… allergies and just general phlegm that I blame on my ancestry), but that feeling of gasping for air, is something I’ve heard of in panic attacks (and maybe experienced, but not really in memory), so similar to the tense moment of the character we’re looking at as Alexi Murdochs song played in Stargate Universe Air - where this tool I had been carrying in my head for all these years was still working but the really trick was just reminding myself to breathe “normally”, from the gut. 

Mouth open, you can actually suck a whole lot more air - it had nothing to do with breathing through the nose or mouth - it’s just easier to less deliberately breathe through the nose.

The calculating of one’s own breathing leads to unnatural breath. While part of the design of my ritual / exercise was / is to regulate and bring down my heart rate, I didn’t mean to replace the best ways of natural breathing with a forcing of myself to mechanically replicate the pacing and patterns of the best natural breathing.

I don’t have a specific lesson here but:

• it’s ok to reveal your tricks and sometimes your own tricks can need rethinking 
• You might surprise yourself if you just find your own way of being. So often our lives feel like our own personal spell books composed of the bests of our memory / education / authorities, etc… and while complex recipes require careful precision and many steps, it’s good to keep the simple things simple and pure.
• I probably will have lost some of the specialness of the song for my own calming routines, but the preciousness is not essential to the goals I usually have of just calming down (if I’m actually anxious or just wanting to slow my breathing down, the result is what I want, and how we get there is now easier without that mechanical breathing I had fallen into for as long as I can recently remember)

But if my memory serves me well (and it only does like half of the time), I first thought up the exercise when panicking over work and escaping it with TV, Stargate Universe here, when the song just worked.

Something clicked and I noticed how much calmer Alexi Murdochs guitar and vocals made me.

I looked up lyrics the next day and I just hummed them to myself all that week.

Over time the exercise became “in breathe and out breathe” at different cadences in the verse, getting further apart from whatever the starting interval I could count in my head was at. Slowing down breath intentionally…. With like an almost math..

But just last night I remembered to breathe again.

Sometimes we forget our own truths, and sometimes we never shed enough to learn and make room for new ones. 

It’s 12:30 am now and I’ll post this, but hopefully no-one’s anxiously awake reading this.

And if you are - don’t forget to breathe.