How to Breathe
There’s a version of this where I try out all the breathwork apps. A version where I do some holotropic regression in Berlin and interview the practitioner at an oxygen bar. Where I read some books, source some quotes, say a few things about pranayama and buteyko and mouth tape and maybe quote a couple studies about oxygenation and VO2 max. I might even rope in some Andean or Nepali villagers, recruit studies on lifestyle and elevation into the mix, invoke some pastoral longing – and vaguely hope that the spiritual reputations of those places are settling somewhere into the vibe, without me needing to explicitly say it.
In that version, I probably end on a satisfied note, tying a bow around everything, leaving myself, and you, with a sense that I’m finally on the path to Breathing Correctly.
That’s a very substack-shaped version. Quite marketable. It feeds what wants to be fed, those hungers for authoritative citations, proven techniques, crisp prose, peak experiences that hint at hidden meaning waiting right in front of my nose and it's industrious lil nostrils.
I’m not very interested in that version. In living it or writing it or reading it. It makes me tired to think about.
This whole project I’m starting, going back to the ground and re-assessing how I do the most basic things — when I think about doing it in the substack-shaped, research-and-sample-two-things-per-month tone and cadence, I just. I get tired. Nauseous. My fire dies.
I’m going to be with how to breathe. And I’m going to do it how I need to do it.
A lot of meditation starts with the breath. One reason is that it’s both automatic and voluntary. You can control it, and it keeps going if you stop controlling it.
The really special thing, for me, is how paying attention to the breath confronts me. It shows me that I’m often incapable of paying attention to something without controlling it. Or at least without the control-impulse activating in me. There's an entire vibe where I convince myself I'm "just observing" the breath, when really I'm still controlling it, I'm just quieting the control and orienting it towards "breathing naturally," to convince the observing part of me that we're totally not interfering.
The control impulse is interesting. I think of sports fans, watching other people play a game, sometimes on the other side of the world – and still, some subroutine in their mind clenches and pushes and pulls and breath-holds, trying to control the route of a passed ball, or the ability of a particular player.
The drive to control what we observe fascinates and amuses me. Why do we do that? Why is it so adorable? Why does it take literal years of focused work to release significantly, and why does it take more years after that to release entirely? Is it really that important, on that deep of a level? Or are we all just traumatized?
July, 2026. I was lying behind my friend, cuddling with my arm around her stomach. I felt my own belly rise and fall against her back, and hers rise and fall under my arm. "You breathe so deep," I said, "I haven't noticed how shallow my breath is lately til now."
"Yeah," she said, "I was wondering if you were kinda holding your breath or something. You can breathe deeper."
As soon as I had permission, I noticed an odd pattern – that I kind of needed permission. To breathe. Which is… wow. Whenever I breathe deep or hard, I try to hide it. I don't know if someone made fun of me as a child for breathing too hard, or if I just adopted some prey animal's fear of being noticed by breathing too conspicuously, but. Somehow, I could feel a very, very young thread running through my whole life, where I had to hide any hard or deep breathing from the people around me.
I took a few experimental deep breaths. There was a thread of fear there, astonishing to notice. I let the fear unstick itself and relax into the rest of me. I let myself feel that there's no need to be afraid of breathing deep in front of people anymore. Not sure there ever was, but I guess it felt that way, for a long time.
Early 2023. Breath echoes through the body a bit, if you let yourself notice. In the second or so following the inhale, it's like I can feel oxygen reverberate outward through my torso and limbs, my tissue satiating itself on the oxygen it needs. There's a feeling of gratitude in it, a feeling like I'm feeding a beloved pet. And it's me — I'm the beloved pet, this body and its eager tissues.
There's a lot to be said for attending to the breath at the nostrils and mouth, I'm sure. But for me, nothing beats the echo-glow of letting the whole body participate in the breath. Everything lets go a little more, when it's all invited to sit at the table. The muscles in my ribs and belly that I don't realize are tight, are slightly constricting how much breath can open in me — they soften, the let in a bit more air, they take part in a little more breath.
August, 2025. Walking down a country road, I become — it's hard to describe this exactly — I become aware of The Breather. Some being or subroutine or part of me whose identity and role are just that. They breathe. It's the part of me that breathes.
I'm a little unsettled at first, like finding a foreign object in my psyche. But as the Breather keeps breathing, and I notice myself stepping into the breathing a bit more, I realize that me and the Breather merge in and out of each other all day. He's a flavor I recognize, a dutiful worker. One of the parts of me that's usually invisible.
After a few hours of coming back again and again to him, marveling at his quiet tenacity, always there in the background, I start to wonder about the other parts of me like that. I start to feel my heartbeat, to quiet myself, like I'm in a forest and hoping for a deer to approach. Slowly, it comes into view — the Heartbeater. An absolute workhorse, nose to the grindstone, beat after beat after beat. It makes me sad somehow, noticing that the Breather has this same feel to it, like a student trying to work on the Correct answer, or an employee trying to keep his head down and not get noticed, to just do his job and not invite any wrath.
I recognize that feel. I've lived a lot of my life in that feel. Makes sense that even my autonomic functions have absorbed it. Over the next days, I let myself breathe, let my whole body feel the breath. Let my heartbeat be aware of the breath. I soak in a feeling of spaciousness, like my cells all have a little bit more room between them than usual. A feeling like it's okay to sit up straight, stretch out my shoulders, twist my ribcage, look up at the sky. The Breather and Heartbeater are reticent to join in, but they do soften towards it, just a touch. Some quality of my heartbeat changes, or maybe just some quality of how I notice it.
My breathing definitely changes. Like beating the heart and breathing, they don't have to be so effortful. They don't have to be so goal-oriented. A feeling of good work as its own reward. I can beat my heart because it's good work, not because I Have To Do It Correctly. It can be the focus of The Heartbeater without it being his whole world. Breath can be the work of The Breather without it being his whole world. I can let myself do whatever I'm doing without collapsing myself to make it My Whole World.
September, 2026. After writing a first draft of this piece, I got sick for about a week. One of the big drivers was that my diaphragm started reorganizing, contracting and twitching and releasing throughout the day without warning. Which pushed and pulled on my digestive system in unpredictable ways. I could hardly eat, because the bottom of my stomach wouldn't empty into my intestine — it didn't have room. All my organs seemed to tighten up, trying to ride this out.
I don't know if writing about something activates it in my body or reality somehow. Or if I chose to write about it because my body already knew and felt something was moving. Or if reality is like music, and things simply coincide and harmonize because that's how the music works. I think it's mostly all three. My torso feels much lighter and more spacious on draft two than it did on draft one. It's a strange thing, lightness.
"Let the breath be aware of itself" is a prompt I gave myself a few years ago. It's stayed relevant to me, and seems to have helped some others. The important bit is that it's not my me, the habitual node of awareness behind my eyes, being aware of the breath. There's not a me over here and the breath over there, one being aware of the other.
It's simply that before I ever even think of the breath, there's already some awareness intrinsic to it. My me can check in on that awareness if it wants — but it can be much lighter, much deeper, to just allow the breath's awareness to expand, brighten, bloom into its own space.
Don't be aware of the breath — just let the breath be aware of itself. Somehow, the body reconfigures in slow waves when I do this. Cells open up to breath a little more. Shoulder muscles stop pulling the chest tighter. Lungs insist a little more on the space they can take up. Something a little luminous trickles into the area around me. It's nice.
Mid 2024. Whenever I try to "do" "Breathwork™", there's something in my body that ranges between reticence and revulsion. The feeling is that if I want my breathing to be more natural, I need to allow it to be more natural, over and over again. Forcing it into certain patterns that my conscious awareness thinks it should take on feels violent and counterproductive. It's trying to control and restrict the options of a thing who's entire "problem" is that it's been over-controlled and had its options restricted for too long.
There's a role of the yang impulse to make new things happen — certain muscles may need to be stretched or strengthened, certain habits may need to be practiced — but the feeling in me is that this needs to be a gentle commitment over time. Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. This forcing, wrenching mode of counting and enforcing the duration and depth of each breath, there's a subtle sadness that comes with it. Something gorgeous and nocturnal curls in on itself, defeated. The learned helplessness of a trained body, of something that wants to be free but has accepted regimentation instead.
Breath and spirit mean the same thing in so many traditions. I shouldn't be surprised that what feels best to me in breathing is a gentle, constant attention to nurturing its own insistent intelligence.
Oh, in some ways it feels like my job here is to parent my breath.
That's not the first time this has come up. When I really move towards the stances that feel best to me towards aspects of reality, or myself, or even certain aspects of other people, it often comes around to something that feels like parenting. Dedicating myself to letting that thing be nurtured, to grow strong and autonomous in its own will and intelligence.
I wonder if that will be a running theme. When I write this, it feels like my breath is having some big feelings about it. There's fear there. Feels like my job is just to be a safe presence for that fear to move without getting trapped or inflated or pushed aside. What does breathing become when its allowed to become what it is?
