Thurs, Nov 15
... I'm desperate for you
Learning to breathe.
I've been thinking about that phrase a lot, and, like many things, it takes on more significance the more it's thought about.
As a theatre major, so much of what we do is based, ultimately, in breath. Movement, voice, emotion, singing, power, sensitivity, control, range... everything. The breath is the foundation of everything we do, and so many people do it improperly. That's almost an oxymoron, because breathing is something that we'd die without, but it's something that we get into habits of doing that don't keep us breathing as deeply or as fully as we should be. We get by, but we don't thrive the way God intended our bodies to thrive from the breath he gives us.
Breath unlocks so much of our bodies and emotions that we keep locked away. Opening up the breath opens up so much that we've hidden away for such a long time. It releases old fears and old tears that haven't been thought of in ages, that were never released in the first place, maybe.
So it's the whole idea of learning to do something that we've always done, but learning to do it better, so it's more effective. "This is the air I breathe... this is the air I breathe... Your holy presence, living in me." I was born with a longing and a hunger for God, and I grew up knowing that he was the only way to fill that hunger. Over the years, though, I let my "breathing" become shallow, and even though I was taking in the Presence that is Life, I was only taking in enough to get by. Enough to survive, not enough to thrive. Enough to know what it is to have breath, but never enough to fully catch it and know the fulfillment and deep down release of a full belly breath. The release of the tears, and the fears, and everything that's been hidden.
I can't breathe properly, physically without stretching the muscles that are weak from disuse. It takes practice and time, and constant work, to get them to a place where I fall into the natural, constant habit of breathing the way my body was intended to breathe. In the same way, my spiritual muscles have become so weak with disuse that it doesn't happen overnight that they're stretched out enough to breathe fully and deeply. A little bit at a time, they're stretched. And stretching them isn't always comfortable, because it's moving them past their comfort zone into a place where they have to work to be used. But it's only by stretching them that they'll become strong enough, supple enough, toned enough to breathe constantly and deeply.
I'm not there yet. I'm barely stretching the shallow little chest breathing. I'm hardly even moving into the diaphragm, let alone the rich, full belly breath. But I'm stretching it, and one day, I'll breathe in, deeply, and I'll feel that release that comes with a deep breath; that constant release that becomes not an emotional chore, but a way of life, and a way that everything gets dealt with.
"This is the air I breathe... this is the air I breathe... Your holy presence living in me... This is my daily bread... This is my daily bread... your very word spoken to me... And I, I'm desperate for you... And I, I'm lost without you..."
infinite || abyss
posted at 10:48 p.m.
