The Release

The inhalation of a deep breath is met with tension. The body expands, and like a balloon its sinews elongate and stretch outwards, eager to contract again like elastic bands. We feel this tension and, after a pause, when we allow the breath to escape from our lungs, with it goes that tension.

This release – and the relief that comes with it – when intentionally observed, is fundamental. With each outward breath we can release the tension throughout our physical selves. We breathe in, and then, breathing out, we can release the tension in our necks. We breathe in, and then, breathing out, we release the tension around our eyes. We breathe in, and then, breathing out we release the tension in our shoulders. Then our torso. Then our arms. Limb by limb, we scan, releasing, releasing, releasing.

Letting go.

With our breathing as our guide we command our physical body to do our bidding, to take a break from its hard work, to pause and settle in. But while we are directing our breath to the various parts of our physical presence, we are also guiding our non-physical selves away from places where where our unconscious might wish to lure them.

But this release, this letting go that comes with the out breath, it’s something else. Something more. A doorway, perhaps, into other ways of experiencing our awareness and ourselves. In the release we let go of rationality and free ourselves to daydream. To explore our imaginations in a waking state. To see and feel new facets of our creative minds that we might have previously dismissed as not-useful, impractical, or simply not even notice before.

But here we can taste something new. New flavours of consciousness. New dimensions of awareness. New corridors that already exist within ourselves, which were otherwise hidden beneath the tactile and the real, the flesh and the bones.

Down here, in the deeper parts of our subconscious, we are free to merge real sensations with imaginary environments. We can brings the experiences of our waking selves into communion with the experiences of our dreaming selves. We can explore ideas, and notions the like of which we have left undisturbed since we were children.

But now, with older eyes and a more worldly perspective, we can add flesh to the bones of our naïve childhood daydreams, add layers of texture and colour. We can weave a tapestry of sights and sounds, of flavours and smells, as much or as little hubbub as we desire, to create avenues and vistas and palaces and realms of experience which have never existed, until now. And now that they do, they have existed for the entirety of eternity.

We are world builders.

We are gifted with the ability to see impossible landscapes that cannot be possible, cannot be real. But somehow we make them so. We can dance between moons, fly on magic carpets, swim as goldfish, become formless, limitless, infinite, immaculate. We can become the dream that we are dreaming.

We are blessed from birth with the ability to see things that the laws of physics cannot touch. Intricate chemistries that defy scientific explanation. Biological feats that challenge nature herself. And all we have to do is let go of the idea that we cannot.

Just let go. Let go. Release. Breathe out.

When we breathe in, we bring the world around us – the infinite universe – into ourselves. And when we breathe out we release ourselves into the infinite universe. We are the drop of water in the sea. The eddy in the ocean. The breeze in the air.

Breathe out.