The last breath's space

Monday, 14 January 2008 17:11

The "Big Tree". This was the name of their beloved meeting place for a lot of years. An enormous walnut amidst a flat, burgeoning chamomile blossoms in a small plateau each spring, somewhere in the mountains. The colors, the sounds and the emotion flooded the moment of their last meeting. It was the moment for the one of them to give his last battle, to dance his last dance. The presence of their two was creating a dome of deafening silence. As if the birds and the cicadas were heard from a lot of distance, out of the sphere of the serene quietness that characterized the patient and sweet acceptance of the ending of each creature that has come  in life.

-         “The answer always lies in the breath” By this phrase he decided to break the silence. The words that would be heard were essential for the circle to come full.

-         “Each time you doubt you have to turn your awareness there”

-         “What do you mean?”  he asked him.

-         “In each breath you find the history of birth, development, destination and function of the mankind. You will discover your own history inside it and what ties you with every creature alive.”

-         “Tell me please.”

-         “Looking into breathing you return and remember”

Maybe is the sense of self-preservation that prompts for the start. May be because death lurks the separation from the familiar and humid sense of liquid safety has not been decided. There you are on your way and through this stifling tunnel pushing and struggling. Voices, sounds, touches, a bright dazzling light and a sense of hefty surprise between the shoulder blades and the marvel begins with a plangent crying. Inhalation … exhalation.

This succession, will accompany you, inalterable, until the last moment of your life, when it will end forever. It is not, therefore, accidental that in almost all religious beliefs we find allusions for the divine origin of breathing. In most of them the breathing is indeed the gift of God to man.

How strange however! You have a divine gift and hardly ever do you pay any attention to admire and enjoy the advantages that offers you. Maybe because it accompanies you from the very first moment of your life. We have the tendency to take things that aid us with so much strength for granted and many times, indeed, we disdain them.

So, remember, in the first moments of your life, you have only your senses clear, uninfected and unfinished as well and what else is there for you? Your breath. This unique, complete first contact with yourself. Inhalation… exhalation, expansion… contraction. You feel like a big ball inflating and deflating. You don’t know yet the limits of your body, not to mention of your existence. There is no separation between "I" and the "other" yet; you have not built the wall of duality yet, the one you fight so hard to deconstruct now. The only thing you experience is the first evident and fathomless for you sense of a ball expanding and contracting as you breath. This is a familiar sense to you and it lulls you these very first moments, because this was tying you with the wholeness you were sharing in the belly of your mother. You could feel her breath and at the same time breathe her breath. You could hear it coming through her body knowing this is the base of her life and yours at once. That’s why she calms you, because through her breath you could connect and feel beyond, between, the beginning. Now you repeat this sense alone hoping -deceiving yourself perhaps for the first time (?)– That you will succeed in reuniting with the affection, the serenity and the warmth of the beginning.

Then you receive your first touch, or even more your first caress and you experience it immediately with all your primary and clear perception. They touch you and you feel your body, its limits and the inexperienced for your conscience possibilities that are opened by the stimuli and your sensory data. You are stranded from your breath for a while and you travel focusing on your first feelings. You get right into your skin (the skin of your part) for a while and the ball that grows and diminishes vanishes with its vastness. It is your first big sacrifice that is determined by the fate of your kind, the human kind. You do not choose it consciously; you are compelled to make it, because you are human. You sacrifice this unlimited sense of ball that links you with the beginning for the discovery of conscience that is created and is blooming little by little through your senses. However, a discovery that gets along step by step with enthusiasm and pain.

Remember, you pass this door many times and you are bewitched much more times until you say "I am". You get along this path for a long time; you organize your individuality with patience and zeal. You do not understand it, but you spend energy in order to forget the vastness, the chaotic and beyond the forces of your rationalization, interconnection of world and its phenomena. The price you pay, however, is the loss of magic, holy side of life that you accidentally remember in your later course, during these moments given to you by "Grace" only to remind you the inception, the beginning, your starting point. At the point I arrive now, here, under this walnut in the early afternoon light, baring each detail and to feel in this end, the beginning that is beyond the afar."
-         “I have no clear recollection, but your words speak straight to my heart. As you are talking I breathe and in my breath I feel in some inexplicable way, the truth of your words. Tell me how do we come here, how all these things are connected with the practice you shared all these years with me?”

He rose and made some steps looking at the light passing through the foliage and made the walnut looking like a sculpture of silver and gold. He took such a deep breath that his underbelly inflated like a balloon and rooted his legs firmly in the ground. He left his weight resting softly on the ground and for some moments appeared as if he were talking with it. Later he turned to his side; He smiled gently with sparkling eyes and continued.

-         «Our practice has a history of thousands years and it comes from afar, even though I believe that you can find all around the word similar practices. I feel that people of the old time devised them as they realized precisely this swing of conscience that I previously mentioned to you. They bequeathed them to us as a map that helps us even now find our lost way back to the real sensitivity that our kind can develop. We could say that it is something like Ariadne's thread.

Remember and feel again your own course. It reflects the course of all people they walked, walk or they will walk in, in the same path. As you walk along it is as if you step back in the same footprints that led you to the crossroad of this choice. Remember the day when, out of curiosity for something that appeared interesting to you, something spoke inside you and you decided to try and learn the practice.

You stood helplessly, with a sense of indefinite expectation and you started copying the movements that someone else made in front of you. The more you were trying the better you recognized the intensity you piled up in your system and the real distance that separated you from your body. You found it difficult in the beginning as all the others in the same situation before you. This happens because our practice movements cannot be comprehended by the mind of individuality that separates the "I" from the "other" but they can become perceptible by the conscience that feels immediately and without elaboration what happens in the present.

Remember the first directions you were given. Move slowly, patiently, with a continuous, smooth flow, give attention to the body which time after time, moves and changes position and mainly, breathe deeply and calmly during the whole movement. Therefore, from the beginning the directions prompt you to turn back and be connected with the experience of your body, as then, in the first moments of your life. You have no time to conceive why the body moves and changes position continuously every time. Without knowing it, you return to the purity of the perception you had in your very first moments where you were ravished and you began to lose contact with the Beginning. That’s why in our practice the start is so much difficult. We first owe to be purified from all those things that blur this fundamental perception, to step all our steps back sharpening our conscience. The amazing thing in this phase is that we believe we are changing and moving ahead, whilst in fact we deconstruct, sabotage in some way our previous course, break the spell we have put on ourselves.

This is not an easy course, many times it’s painful to cancel choices of years and continuously reveal what you covered with so much effort. Many people give up the practice in this stage. That’s why we say for those who accomplish this, that they acquire the spirit, the heart, the brave heart of a warrior. They fight the most difficult battle, the battle with their selves or with their shadow actually that can last an entire life.”

He walked silent for a while, maybe thinking his next words and then he turned and followed the sun’s course to the west with his eyes for a while, that was happening for him; at least so it seemed, slowly, gently, with nostalgia. He gave the sense of an immigrant that looks to his homeland direction and the more he looked the most transparent he became as if all the intensity of the light of that time penetrated and traveled him to his motherland.

-         “Then, the time you learned the movement came, you made it so many times that it became second nature for you, you conquered positions, you perfected them and in this course you taught yourself how to feel immediately, evidently, sharply, with sharpness, consolidating your presence in the present with the simplicity and the curiosity of an infant. At this stage the directions as to the way of practicing this movement changed. You were asked to alter the focus of your attention from the body to breathing, to combine the breath with the movement and experience their combination, to become movement and breath at once, without thought, just this. Once again at the beginning you were complicated, remember, to match them. Some times you were suffocating, feeling your breath insufficient and in this stifling atmosphere you learned to relax, to yield, to get even free, till the time all simmered down, tamed, returned to silence and your breath rolled freely and effortlessly in the transforming body. Breathing and movement became one, then and you lost yourself. Remember. Once again you became breath, an inflating and deflating ball, something tangible and intangible at the same time that unfolds and returns; you couldn’t you say “I”, “mine”, “this”, “the other” anymore, you found yourself, for a while, beyond the binary perception that separates them. You calmed down, remember, motionless in the ball movement, as a lake blessed by God in a windless dawn, where its surface reflected everything.

Then, the ball vanished all of a sudden and along with this every sense of limit; the whole world became a breath, the earth you stepped on, the trees around you, the wind and the sun, everything expanded and shrunk, opened in the infinity and returned, timeless, placeless, a wave in the Sea that Lives. For a while, for ever, who knows, you found yourself in the Beginning once again, you live a breath of His, a breath of yours, the Breathing, the Blow, the Spirit. Remember, in a few moments the world changed, it stopped his perpetual rotation and allowed you to take a glimpse in its insides momentarily. Remember, what the eyes that weren’t yours anymore saw, the light and how it flooded everything around making them sparkle like magic oil lamps just cleaned by the hand of their creator and showed their precious existence cocksurelly. Remember you lived everywhere, your presence and your breathing extended with no limits altogether, you were a hungry child somewhere afar, imploring, crying for your food, you were the human histories, which the wind drifted from afar, from other places, histories happening at that moment or even centuries before, centuries after, you were the Mothers’ earth soil vibrating under the legs that weren’t yours anymore, you were the trees that shimmered as they breathed with you, you were each creature, the creation and the creator, the Life. You were ONE."

He had closed his eyes and was breathing slowly, deeply, rhythmically just like hypnotized by his friend’s voice which he felt so close when it was whispering in his ear, as if he could hear him from his inside reminding him the course, when he decided to return and meet his gaze. But when he did it, the only thing his glance met was nothing but the Big Tree, the walnut floodlighted by the last light of the day, swaying bright and dancing with the soft sunset wind. He was not there anymore. A last sunbeam embraced a tree in a little distance to the end of the small plateau, in the edge of the forest. For a moment, the light by the tree seemed to him as it thickened into a golden ball, but maybe it was just his idea. Then, a soft wind made leaves of the walnut dance and caressed softly his hair. A voice whispered to him:

- “Even if a last breath is left in you, this one and only is enough to restore life.”

He smiled and understood. He turned and looked at everything around him, let himself listen, smell, savor, feel, breath. He was everywhere life existed. They were and will stay forever one.

He took his way back. Inside and all around him he felt no bitterness. Just nostalgia and Light.