"And if you're not able to breathe, just back out of where you are. You've gone too far. You need to breathe."
No reaction.
Psst. Wake up. Return from where you've gone. You're not breathing. And when you can't breathe for long enough, you suffocate. Don't die here. Don't die on this artificial, concrete-block ground. Breathe.
More often than not, I don't die. Maybe if there was real soil under my knees, the voice would let me. Or maybe I'd breathe without needing to be reminded. It don't make me special. Most people don't breathe as much as they should, or as deep as they should. Even though there's immense power to breath, and we should pay attention to it.
Your body knows when it's satiated. It knows when it's hungry, or injured, or needs to rest. It's only your brain that doesn't know, and maybe that's because the information travels more slowly all the way up there. Maybe your brain speaks a different language than your body, I don't know.
I was thinking how bizarre it is, the way we seize up in moments of extreme tension. Physical, surely, but also emotional. We breathe rapidly, short, shallow breaths when we're in a bad situation. It is, no doubt, an animal instinct in us. Maybe if we breathe too loud, a predator will hear us through the reeds, and the bushes. Maybe fangs will graze the pink inside of our throat. Maybe danger.
Final.
Maybe we're working with a saboteur from the inside. The less you breathe, the more insecure you become. Each shallow breath tricks your brain into thinking you're in more danger than you are. Breathe. Except you can't. Because you've worked yourself up into such unbearable guilt, and tension, and anger, and fear.
And insecurity. You can only breathe when you feel secure. Except no, that's gotta be a lie. You have to breathe always. How? In and out. It helps if you can identify the place that hurts. The object of the anger and the fear. I like to take in a great, big, hungry breath and send all the oxygen I can spare into the parts that hurt the most. They're inevitably the most tense.
I imagine the hurt, in its square, roundabout, lunchbox shape. My breath rises or lowers, travels through arteries, and through roadpaths as of yet undiscovered in my body, until it reaches the hurt. It's a punch to the solar plexus. It's a direct hit that elongates the suffering. Bends it all out of shape.
I know why it's so hard to breathe into the things that hurt us. We're afraid that by breathing into them, they'll expand. Oxygen feeds fire. Cut off a fire's oxygen, you cut off its life force. You save the house from burning down. But not hurt. Hurt works different. The more air you focus into it, the more it stretches, but it can't stretch forever. It pulls, and dilutes its cells until they're no longer blood-red, but dust pink. Then grey.
I believe you can breathe into a hurt so much and so intensely, until it dissipates entirely.
Until you encounter, occasionally, the cells of what once was malevolent and dark inside your soul, but now no longer is. Maybe, if you pay enough attention, you'd recognize the pain that once was. Maybe not. But you gotta breathe. 'Cause when you leave things in dark, unaired corners of your innermost self, they're safe, and they fester. They stay small, but they stay fucking tough. Until they've seeped into every inch of your sanctum. Until you can't enter, and there's no walls of your self to cling on to.
Breathing may be the most scary thing you have to do in this life. Because it takes guts to breathe fire into the monster's face, and maybe it's time someone told you that.