„The age of breath“, an essay by French philosopher and feminist Luce Irigaray, opens thus: „The divine appropriate to women, the feminine divine, is first of all related to the breath. To cultivate the divine in herself, the woman, in my opinion, has to attend to her own breathing, her own breath, more even than to love. Breathing, in fact, corresponds to the first autonomous gesture of a human living, and it is not possible to be divine without being autonomous with respect to the mother and the father, to the lover, to the child, to the others in general, women and men.“
By cultivating the divine within oneself, she picks up on the breath practices that were developed by men in ancient cultures. At the same time, she qualifies cultivating the divine within oneself as cultivating „the divine breath received as human beings“, breathing as a life force, breathing as a natural movement, not as we will it to be. „Attending to one‘s own breathing“ is then to be in agreement with and to support one’s breathing as „the autonomous gesture of a human living“.
I would like to point out that wherever Luce Irigaray speaks of humans, women and men, the same applies to all animals. Just as philosophers have largely forgotten that the thinking being exists only as a body in air – which, according to Luce Irigaray, should be their prime inquiry – she forgets that humans are animals, to whom the same laws of existence applies.
Nevertheless this fascinating philosophy sets a clear path for women to „accept active responsibility for (their) spiritual life“ and „to make divine this world – as body, as cosmos, as relations with the others.“
Source: Luce Irigaray, Die Zeit des Atmens/the age of breath, Christel Göttert Verlag, 2005