I’d just had a discussion with my best friend Sivan about what differentiates humans from animals and we couldn’t really come to a satisfactory conclusion. A day later, in my inbox I find Zac Bush’s podcast with Aubrey Marcus in which, Zac Bush talks about this topic (around minute 50). As always, his words were thought-provoking and inspired me in my reflection about breathing:
„The entire brain is a manifestation of sensory input and output. And so the brain, our whole neurological system is there so that we experience our environment. And that experience does not happen in the grey matter in our head. Experience is a peripheral event, so it’s really the interaction of our skin or the surface of our eye, or the vibration of our tympanic membrane in our ear, that is where this experience is happening. We have this extraordinary ability as humans, and this is, I think, what separates us from animals, to divorce ourselves from this experience. And this is the tragedy of the human intelligence, that the grey matter in our head has such a power to reorganise the data that’s coming into it – it’s the ultimate CPU chip, that central processing unit you would have in your computer on your desktop – that grey matter has such an ability to reorganise and find new patterns of belief, or patterns of existence, that it forgets its origin, it forgets the initial data that came in.
A flower or a monkey in the jungle never forgets its origin story of the data that’s coursing into the CPU chip in the morning. It knows that its experience is because it’s an element of nature. The monkey knows that it is in vibration with every other organism, the tree frog, the dragonfly, all the insects in the jungle, all the way down into the microorganisms of the soil. It’s got this sense of community, this sense of fellow-ship and it never loses track of that.“
The “vibration with every other organism” happens in many different ways and one of them is through breathing. Breathing is vibration, by its very nature, inside of our body, as well as with everything around us. It happens within the community that is our body and in the co-existence with our fellow living beings. And to the extent that we divorce ourselves from this experience, in thought and action, it affects our breathing.
This is what my work Natural Breathing to me is about, finding my way back to myself as an element of nature.