A few weeks ago, I watched the Batman/The Dark Knight Trilogy from Christopher Nolan again and there is a great breathing scene in Batman begins. Bruce Wayne, in training with Ra‘s al Ghul, the leader of the League of Shadows, inhales the smoke of a ground blue mountain flower containing halluciogenic properties. Ra‘s al Ghul guides him through his journey, „Breathe. Breathe. Breathe in your fears.“ As Bruce inhales the smoke, we can see the fumes taking their effect, transporting him into the traumatic memories of being trapped in a cave surrounded by bats and of his parent’s murder when he was a boy.
Bruce then walks through a corridor between two blocks of League of Shadows fighters up to an ancient metal box obviously meant for him. He knows he needs to confront his greatest fear, his trauma, and lifts the lid of the box. A swarm of bats storm out and overwhelm him. But because he can sense his own fear exactly and its effects on his mind, he can differentiate between his distorted perceptions and his physical reality. The fear of bats, he now knows, is in his mind; the bats themselves are not attacking him, they only want to escape their confinement and to fly away.
It‘s a magical scene and it shows the power of the process of breathing. Inhaling a substance from the outside world can evoke something from the inside world. Through breathing, the outside and the inside merge, in this case, in a mystical and ultimately transformative way: Bruce Wayne, from that moment on, is becoming Batman.