What is Breath

The source of life energy

(A Montage of Quotes)

Over the millenia, every teaching known to humankind has made mention of the breath:

Breath is the dance of life flowing in and out of the body.
Just like the oean waves, breath comes in and out, sometimes gently, sometimes forcefully, always in rhythm.

- Dorisse Neale

"Ailei ioli" - Breathe in the Flowers

"All healing originally resides in the human breathing system." - Rudolf Steiner

"The perfect man breathes as if he is not breathing." - Lao-Tzu (circa 4th century BC)

The smoke of my own breath echoes, ripples...I sing the body electric. - Walt Whitman

"The ribs are like the fingers of the Divine Mother holding us gently, yet firmly" - Dorisse Neale

"To use your breathing to nurture mindfulness, just tune in to the feeling of it...the feeling of the breath coming into your body and the feeling of the breath leaving your body. That's all. Just feeling the breath. It's just a bare bones awareness of the breath moving in and the breath moving out."

- Jon Kabat-Zinn

"Fear is excitement without the breath." - Fritz Perls

There's a way of breathing that's a shame and suffocation.
And there's another way of expiring a love breath that lets you open infinitely.

- Rumi

Kabir says: Are you looking for me? I am in the next seat. My shoulder is against yours. You will not find me in stupas, not in Indian shrine rooms, nor in synagogues, nor in cathedrals: not in masses, nor kirtans, not in legs winding around your own neck, nor in eating nothing but vegetables.

When you really look for me, you will see me instantly - you will find me in the tiniest hours of time.

Kabir says: Student, tell me, what is God? He is the breath inside the breath.

- Kabir 12th century Persian sufi

"Over the oxygen supply of the body carbon dioxide spreads is protecting wings." - Miescher, 1885

"It is our quiet time.
We do not speak, because the voices are within us.
It is our quiet time.
We do not walk, because the earth is all within us.
It is our quiet time.
We do not dance, because the music has lifted us to a place where the spirit is.
It is our quiet time.
We rest with all of nature. We wake when the seven sisters wake.
We greet them in the sky over the opening of the kiva."

- Navajo saying

"The breath is the horse, the mind is the rider." - Tibetan saying

"The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home...so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound."

- Annie Dillard

"I am the Breath that Nourishes Live" "Owau no ka ha ka mauli ola" - Ancient Hawaiian Ho'Oponopono

"I've learned that there's nothing sweeter than sleeping with your babies and feeling their breath on your cheeks."
Anonymous

"You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and ordinary. The world will freely offer itself to be unmasked, it has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet."

- Franz Kafka

Breathwork is like a non-specific homeopathic remedy for the psyche.

The golden rule is that "Breathless people always overbreath."