Breath is crucial for life. Physical respiration goes on as a largely unconscious process as the body exchanges oxygen and carbon dioxide to power the activities of every cell in our bodies. Deliberate deep breathing will ensure that we take in enough oxygen and can calm feelings of breathlessness or fear. Conscious breathing used as part of a spiritual practice focuses the mind's attention and helps relieve stress on our bodies.
Meditation is when it is clear to you that God is closer to you than your own breath.
Every breath we draw is a gift…every moment of existence is a grace.
I am the Breath inside the breath.
O Beloved,
your way of knowing is amazing!
The way you recognize every creature
even before it appears.
The way you gaze into the face
of every human being
and see all your works gazing back at you.
O what a miracle
to be awake inside your breathing.
Sow in me your living breath,
As you sow a seed in the earth.
Another world is not only possible, she is on her way.
On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
Part of being human is to experience moments of true perception about those things that touch you so intimately that suddenly you see. What you see (or read or hear) at such moments has a ring of truth about it, not just of a general kind but as something that takes on a dimension and depth for you so that it becomes your truth. It seems to be making a claim on you. Such moments don't come often. Hold on to them. Cherish them until they become so much a part of you as to be second nature. For there is only one persistent demand made upon us by the Spirit. It is that we are receptive. That we keep our eyes open, our minds unclosed. It is, in short, that we retain all our lives our sense of wonder.
The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.
The practice of paying attention is the rarest of gifts because it depends upon the harshest of disciplines. So uncommon is it for us to grasp the beauty and mystery of ordinary things that, when we finally do so, it often brings us to the verge of tears. Appalled by our own poverty, we awake in wonder to a splendor of which we had never dreamed.