Breath Rider

When I was a toddler, my grandmother and the island midwife told me that I was born blue with the breath stuck in me. A few years later, when my mother left us to work on the mainland and later left Honduras to cross the borders to the U.S., I would again and again struggle to breathe. When I finally came to be with my mother and we experienced being lonely together in the U.S., my struggle for breath continued into my teenage years. I no longer turned physically blue, but dark blue was the familiar color of my emotional landscape.  

It’s now clear to me how these two things – the way I breathe and how I feel, are intrinsically linked. It’s taken me years of studying my breath and my body, of studying my emotions, to know this truth. I traveled my breath to uncover not only how I hold my own pain in the tissue of my body but how I hold in me the despair, poverty, and displacement experienced by generations of ancestors.

What stayed with me as I took my breath journey, through tissue, organs, fluids and bones, is the spirit of water. Water reminds me, and always has, to breathe. The sea accompanied and supported me since I was a child in the Caribbean, and still does, to find the resonance of ebb and flow within my own blood and bloodline, my own heart, my own emotional experience. Through breath, I learned to call in water. As I inhaled, I invited water to cleanse me. As I exhaled, I asked her to protect me and restore flow.

With this connection to water as my foundation, I began to simply notice my breath. This isn’t always easy to do because it’s often coupled with an impulse to change the breath. But noticing does not mean changing. Noticing is bringing attention to breath. When I can simply observe my breath, I become aware of its many nuances. Nuances such as where I feel signs of breathing: my nostrils, my throat, my chest, my abdomen, ribs and back. I notice where I don’t feel signs of breathing, like my jaw. I notice the rhythms of my breath and when they change naturally without me initiating the change. I notice the pause between the inhale and exhale. 

The way the ocean led me to find the resources to explore one of, if not the most basic, most essential elements is miraculous to me. It is a gift that has supported my own healing, the healing of my ancestors, and the healing work I've done and continue to do with my clients. 

I started to discern how I felt after this simple act of noticing breath. I was often more relaxed, more expanded, lighter, and less tense. It then made sense for me to try it when I was struggling. I discovered that it could help me during my most challenging times. 

After I learned to notice my experience of breathing without changing it, I studied the anatomy of breath. Starting with some of the specific tissue involved: that of the nostrils, sinuses, pharynx and larynx and moving down to the trachea, bronchi, to the lungs themselves with their pleurae and their alveoli, and down farther to the muscle that is the diaphragm. I learned that this muscle is connected to one of my thoracic as well as one of my lumbar vertebrae. This meant that I could do breath work to help with back pain. I then studied how the muscles of my neck, chest and abdomen could also be involved in breath. And how my right lung has three lobes and my left lung has only two to make room for my heart. This allowed me to really sense how my heart is connected to breath. Next, I studied the bones involved in breathing, such as those of my ribcage (including my floating ribs), shoulder girdle, sternum, clavicle and spine. 

This more conceptual way of studying my breath, as opposed to the more experiential way of noticing my breath, led to a curiosity about what would happen if I manipulated my breath. I began to imagine that I was breathing from different parts of myself. For example, if I breathed from my muscles, I would imagine gathering up all the muscle tension in my body on the inhale and exhaling it completely. This felt very different than when I imagined breathing from my whole body, the lenses of my eyes, or my cells. The possibilities seemed endless. I experimented with breathing with music, breathing fast and slow, holding my breath in, exhaling and not taking a breath, gentle loving breath, energizing creative breath, breathing while lying on my stomach, breathing while moving, breathing through my nose, through my mouth, and a combination of both. I need to stop and take a deep breath, just thinking of all the ways I breathed! 

So where did this lead me to next? To yoga, of course. This means I did fire breathing, Kundalini breathing, alternate nostril breathing, box breathing, etc. I then studied qi and practiced microcosmic orbit breathing, which is still one of my favorite breathing practices. I even went to Manhattan and studied with a psychologist who calls her work simply, The Breathing Class. 

Again, I need to pause and catch my breath when I think of the many ways I breathed. It’s not that I regret any of them, but it was a lot. And I loved every minute of the two decades I spent studying breath. I count my blessings too, especially when I consider how I grew up – often with not enough to eat or even a place to call home. The way the ocean led me to find the resources to explore one of, if not the most basic, most essential elements is miraculous to me. It is a gift that has supported my healing, my ancestors’ healing, and the healing work I've done and continue to do with my clients. 

I am most grateful for how breath connects me to nature (other favorite practices are to breathe up from the earth and down into it, to breathe with water, and to breathe with trees) and how it connects me to others. (I practice breathing from my heart laterally into my side ribs, down my arms and out toward the people with whom I’m in conversation).

Lastly, I am grateful that my journey eventually carried me to the immense world of somatics, and most specifically, to the Feldenkrais Method. Feldenkrais took me to the heart of noticing, the essence of exploration through movement. And on my way to becoming a Feldenkrais Practitioner I became even more skilled at allowing the waves of breathing to simply come and go, without changing them. Even under pressure. This ultimate gift, this seemingly simple skill, is the one that most allows me to choose my own color with which to paint my emotional landscape.