On Emphasizing the Out-Breath

Play your hunger.
Strum it like a silver chord.
Let it dance like a cool flame
round the earthen walls of
the fine ceramic vase of your body.

Relish the out-breath.
Without it there is no in-breath, no relief;
Yet it is not only an assistant but a 
companion.
Let it tickle your lip and whisper to you
quiet songs of going.

Stare at darkness.
Let it fill your eyes like warm water
in an onyx bowl; and let it
bellow its vacancy, its opening.

Open your windows to let the darklight in.
And now out.

This poem feels right on a day that can feel like the out-breath of the holiday. It’s about balance, about recognizing and deeply appreciating both sides of a duality. Without the ordinary Monday, there is not the special holiday.

And yet, I mean much more than that by this poem. It points me toward something I have encountered in meditation that is very difficult to put into words, but which I’ll try to explain here.

Imagine yourself sitting in meditation. It’s an unguided meditation—just you, sitting with your eyes closed. You are focusing on your breath, until your mind wanders toward narrating the fact that you are focusing on your breath. Okay, back to the breath. Then you notice a pain in your knee. The way you’re sitting is straining it a little. Okay, practice self-compassion: you adjust your posture, and then you continue. Now you feel your chest rising and falling. You notice your rib cage, and you feel the bones in your leg. There’s still a little resistance from your knee. Focus back on the breath. Feel how it tickles your upper lip as you breathe out.

You get the idea.

But notice in each moment how much you are not noticing. Of course, you can’t really do this while you are in the act of noticing. To notice what you’re not noticing is in a sense impossible, because as you scan for things that you aren’t noticing they become the noticed. Yet at each moment, there is a background of the unnoticed against which the noticed takes form. While you are staring at the darkness behind your eyes, observing a mental model or image of your own ribs, it is surround by not-ribs—by a darkness and space against which it stands in contrast.

That space is sometimes called the “Ground of awareness.” It’s like a background of emptiness in your subjective experience, against which particular appearances arise. Your eyes don’t need to be closed to notice it (or, perhaps more accurately, to acknowledge that you are noticing against it or relative to it), though in my experience it does help. The Ground is always present, as long as appearances are present. They are two sides of the same coin.

It is the punchline of many spiritual journeys to realize (in a deeply embodied, intuitive sense) that you are One with that Ground of awareness. Indeed, you can identify with it. You are continuous with this Ground of potentiality, continually arising from it in your conceptual renderings and then diffusing back into it.

You are the negative space as well as the positive presence, interdependently—the out-breath of background emptiness as well as the in-breath of appearance and narrative.

This may sound nonsensical unless or until you have experienced it for yourself, in which case it will make perfect sense.

This realization, in tandem with cognitive behavioral therapy and medication, has been invaluable for me in living with anxiety. My own anxiety is marked by an over-identification with the appearances in awareness, with taking appearances too earnestly that deserve equanimous distance and doubt or scrutiny. Identification with Ground moves the locus of identification from the appearances themselves to the watcher, or the watching, of the appearances.

This is a sort of deathless state where nothing can fundamentally touch me. There is nothing that needs to be done in this state. Insofar as I am identified with Ground, I don’t need to be smart, I don’t need to be funny, I don’t need to be liked. In fact, I cannot be other than I am: encompassing, noticing, becoming and un-becoming.

And yet, from identification with Ground arises a new sort of authenticity and self-expression. This is the authenticity of not trying to be anything in particular. It is to expand my worldview to realize that I am not only as I appear to myself (though this is part of my totality), but that I am also that nebulous [ ] to which and out of which anything appears at all.

It is not ultimately my goal to convince anyone of anything here. But I offer these reflections in case they might be helpful for your own mental well-being as they have been for mine.

Thanks for reading!