Every breath you take (is a paradox)

Is breathing singular or universal? Yes.

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The Paradox of Breath

Breath is perhaps the single most powerful tool for mindfulness.¹

If you’ve done any kind of breath work, you know that there is no better object of focus in the training and awakening of a mind.

Why?

I think it might have something to do with how breath mirrors the inherent polarities of all creation. Think of the poles in electromagnetism, or Newton’s third law of motion, about the push and pull of opposing forces.

Everything has its opposite, and all truth hides in paradoxes.

And so, here is a meditation on the paradox of breath.

Every breath is different

Different body position, differing set of cells, different balance of chemistry. Every time you take a breath, the Earth is in a different position relative to every other celestial body. Each breath is drawn out of a different universe. Both the outer and the inner, for in neither is your mind a static thing, nor the mind of any other.

If you could sum the molecules of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide, if you could measure the hundred, thousand, million other particulates, you would see that each lungful of air itself, no matter how steady, how rhythmic, how similar to the one that came before, leaves a unique fingerprint inside your body.

And so you breathe, an endless march of perfectly singular breaths, inextricably fused to an unending chain of perfectly singular moments, belonging solely to you, a perfectly singular, ever changing and eternal soul.

Every breath is different.

And yet.

Every breath is the same

The same motion, the same set of muscles, the same process couched in the same autonomic somatism. Each breath ignites the same symphony of biochemical reactions. Each one a choice, each one inevitable.

Every creature breathes. Breath is the unifying signature of biology. To breathe is to catalyze countless births and deaths. The cycle of breathing is the substance of environment drawn in, metabolized, burned in the furnaces of creation, and exhaled as smoke from those ceaseless fires.

We inhale what is given, provided by an unfathomable abundance, and we exhale, unthinking, in an endless return. In, always, out, always. One after the other, and another, and another, in a waltz that sets the rhythm of all life.

Every breath is the same.

Do we need to know all this? Do we need to remember it, or solve it to find the truth in the paradox?

No.

We just need to breathe.

1. When I first started trying to write this post, I wound up writing 300 words on the purpose of meditation. I’m gonna go ahead and set that aside for another day.