Sound and Circle of Breath

There are infinite paths to truth. Each one of us has our own direct path.  After decades practicing in the templates of ancient spiritual traditions, I noticed the direct path in my breath.

Anatomically and spiritually my heart is nestled between my lungs. My lungs are like wings with the capacity to carry me directly to center. In any moment the center is where we stand. The center of our essential oneness with everything is a possibility. Each breath moves from micro time and space to the emergence of matter, through to the expansive universe and beyond, then back within. If there was a Big Bang it lives in every breath.

What never ceases to amaze me is that beyond a certain threshold of expanded awareness, beyond the contentment of illuminated presence there is nothing.  A radiant, alive and quiet no thing.  This “aliveness” is not conceptual. For 20 years I’ve wondered how to write about it. Creating a “concept”, packaging it into words, feels like the quantum field collapsing from wave possibilities into solid particle probabilities. As I have heard a few teachers say, the words are pointers.  The sign post on the highway is not the town, the google map to the ocean is not the ocean.

I observe daily three centers of my breathing being: earth/body, heart/mind and heart/spirit. Acupuncture practitioners are trained to listen to at least 3 pulses in the body. I had a teacher who listened to 12. I am not an acupuncturist but I learned from his experience, and the pointers of his words, to recognize these pulses as subtle breaths. Each organ system breathes. Each meridian breathes. Each point on the meridian breathes. He laughed as he said ‘every place is a point’. In my days as a modern dancer, I experienced every cell of my body breathing. I felt the different tissues, the bones, the tendons, the fluids as different flows of breath. Like all of the musicians in a big band, the breaths in our body express the song of us. And through breath we are connected to the song of nature, the song of our culture, the world, the quantum realm, the spirit of life, the breath of god.

Having learned some ancient original sounds as “mantra” I realize that the sound itself is a vibration. The vibrational waves meet in our breath on many levels. First there is the level of the sound shape in our mouth, tongue, throat, diaphragm. Then there is the word meeting the tissues of the body as they breathe, simultaneously creating and receiving the sound. The sound is a vibrational match, a bridge to different fields of reality. The English language has it’s unique qualities as mantra. Because we are a “thinking” society the language has a separating structural sound form. Most of the sounds don’t even penetrate very far back into the tissues of the throat and chest. Our rational minds are educated to break things apart to understand them. This is one kind of knowledge. The sounds of many ancient scriptures in the original languages each have a different unifying structure. Instead of breaking things apart, the sound unifies certain qualities inherent in our being with those qualities inherent in all being. Knowledge opens by vibrational connection. Sound moves on breath.

I came to Circle of Breath after years of repetition of ancient sounds (through prayer and mantra) and listening. The moment it awakened my awareness was a moment of total surrender. I was ill, I could barely breathe, I couldn’t speak and I could only half sleep. Through prayer I was connected to the heart of my teacher and in a half dream state I was shown the circle of my breath from the source to me.

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