Breath
Diving was my first experience feeling intimately connected to my breath. With a bottle of air strapped to my back, I felt invincible as I descended underwater. The screaming panic from my lungs that snorkeling used to evoke was gone. In its place was slow, continuous breathing. All I could hear was my breath drawing air from the respirator, like a life support machine, or Darth Vader, and then the comparatively silly-sounding bubbles as I breathed out. Suspended with a column of seawater pressure above us, we used our breath to control buoyancy. Breathe in, and hold, and we rose. Breathe out, and we sank. Our oxygen tanks were our lifeline. We learned emergency techniques to retrieve them if they fell, to share air with our dive partner if ours ran out, and to swim to the surface in earnest if we couldn’t breathe any other way.
With the tank, my breathing underwater is as automatic as on land, and it allows me to appreciate untold wildlife. I have almost butted heads with a shark, and floated over murderous stingrays, which are psychologically higher in Australians’ hierarchy of deadly animals than spiders and snakes, after Steve Irwin’s tragic death. I have touched the backs of crusty, century-old turtles, and marvelled at rock fish at night that looked indistinguishable from a shipwreck ravaged by coral. Yet for all the nature, what I love most about diving is the calm and serenity of being weightless underwater and listening to my breath, the only sound in the vast ocean.
In India and Sri Lanka, I have become more attune to breath on dry land. “Prana” is the Sanskrit word for breath, though it also poetically means “life force” and many other beautiful definitions. I used to think meditation was about clearing the mind, but a facilitator in Bombay reframed my approach, telling us to simply focus on the breath. It was not about forcing the mind to be clear of thoughts, she murmured to us, while we laid on the floor with our eyes closed and inhaling the smell of incense and colonialism in an old building in Colaba. We merely should notice when the mind wanders away from the breath and gently bring it back. In training the mind to return from distraction, I have since tried to apply this to becoming a better listener to friends or paying more attention to what I am doing, even if it is just staring at the sea or reading a book.
The most exciting breath practice I learned was hyperventilation. I had read about a version of this in Michael Pollan’s exploration of psychedelic therapies (“holotropic breathwork”) as a way to achieve a natural high akin to a mushroom trip. I practiced a milder form in Sri Lanka to prepare for an ice bath, and later in India as part of a healing evening with my yoga instructor. Hyperventilation before the ice bath allowed me to hold my breath for over ninety seconds, when at baseline I lasted just twenty-seven, and I was able to avoid hyperventilation under the ice, staying immersed for two minutes. During the healing evening, my mind felt gooey and free. I felt like I was spinning and flying and open, transported to a place of intense emotion and surprisingly, forgiveness, of others but also myself.
India also made me mindful of how easily the clean air we breathe can be taken away. I arrived in Delhi the week after Diwali, when farmers burn their crops, the air stops moving, and the air quality index topped 400 – “hazardous to all”. I had no time to buy a mask to ward off particulates from my lungs before I boarded my train to Agra, the home of the Taj Mahal. I thought I would look out of place without one, an amateur tourist who had inadequately prepared for the city’s weather conditions. The platform was crowded, and the carriage packed, but I only remember seeing a handful of people covering their faces. The rest braved the air, thick with smoke.
I cannot remember another time I had been so afraid of suffocation as I was sitting on that train, waiting to depart. The air indoors was cloudy and soaked up the colours, tricking my vision into believing we were in a sepia photograph. As the doors closed, I irrationally imagined the steady exchange of oxygen for carbon dioxide slowly poisoning me and my fellow travellers. My seat was by the window, which ordinarily would be a boon in a stuffy, hot carriage, but today, the air outside was toxic. As thoughts of a stampede to disembark an oxygen-less train compounded my anxiety, I closed my eyes and focused on inhaling and exhaling, the panic making it even harder to breathe.
Eventually, the carriage started moving, the air began to flow, and my fears subsided. The ability to breathe is an overlooked gift, something simple yet powerful to be grateful for on days when everything feels bleak. I am thankful to live somewhere with safe air that can fill my lungs, without pain or damage, and to be able to let breath take me on journeys to explore new worlds, and the world within.