Watching God Breathe for Me
A reminder of our oneness with the world
I can sometimes forget when I watch my body breathing, as in meditation, that I am witnessing a microcosm of life and death.
That first inhalation as a newborn was the moment I signaled to the world that I was here to stay by taking a small piece of the world into me. And I know that I will signal that my time here is over when I send another back to the world, as if a silent goodbye.
Until then, it helps me to watch my breath with that reverence. When I catch myself getting bored with my breath, as if it were nothing more than an automatic function of my brain, I pause and ask myself: Who is doing the breathing?
Call it Life, call it God — some invisible force moves my breath for me. Then I can marvel at the simplicity and grace of Life moving through me, one breath at a time.
This simple shift reminds me that I am not separate from the world, but, like I did the very first time, I take it in with each inhalation, and return a part of me to it with each exhalation.
Where do I begin and does the world end? I can’t find that line in my breath. The boundary gets lost in vapor.
I can then bring this reverence to the bodies of everyone I encounter, setting aside differences to see…
