As a response to the current situation, I devoted my April posts to bats who, as I wrote, are getting very bad press at the moment. As an act of solidarity I’m continuing with my bat posts in May.
In my capacity as a breath teacher, I can‘t offer a miracle breathing technique that protects anyone from disease. What I can offer is education and a pledge for co-existence.
Like all other living beings, humans need a sustainable habitat, clean air, clean water and healthy food. Like all other living beings, us humans are a product of the environment we create. If human industries pollute the air and water and produce disease inducing foods, no amount of conscious breathing is going to protect us and other living beings.
If anything, it is breathing that teaches us that humans are animals among other animals, living beings among other living beings.
As humans, we co-exist equally in the respiratory cycle with other animals and plants. So how can it be that humans wilfully abuse, exploit, exhaust and destroy other animals and the earth? As long as this is the reality humans create, all so-called problems or crises, to my mind, pale into insignificance. The top priority must be to create a base for co-existence. Co-existence means being in the same boat with other living beings, breathing together, sharing the air.
In the context of co-existence, it doesn’t make sense to blame bats or other animals for viruses. And it goes against the moral fibre to use them for experimentations or for finding vaccines against viruses which we humans have, at least in part, created. Rather, it would serve us more to focus on the needs humans, bats and other animals have in common, for our joint survival and well-being.
Speaking of well-being, compassion is the greatest enhancer of balance in the body, namely in the autonomic nervous system which regulates blood pressure, heart rate, digestion and, of course, breathing.
To complete my pledge of solidarity with bats at this time, I‘d like to share a „bat“ poem of one of my favourite poets: Theodore Roethke. In 2018 I already posted a poem of his and there are surely others to look forward to.
The Bat
By day the bat is cousin to the mouse.
He likes the attic of an aging house.
His fingers make a hat about his head.
His pulse beat is so slow we think him dead.
He loops in crazy figures half the night
Among the trees that face the corner light.
But when he brushes up against a screen,
We are afraid of what our eyes have seen:
For something is amiss or out of place
When mice with wings can wear a human face.
Theodore Roethke
Source: Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke, Knopf Doubleday Publishing, 1953