I 
I 
I 
I 
I
I
I
In and out. Down to my pelvis and up to my collarbones.
I move the breath
around now, using its energy to flow deeper. I can hear
the exhalations of
the older woman behind me. I can hear the inhalations of
the pierced and
tattooed guy on my left. He is a forceful breather, and
moans sometimes on
his exhales, loudly like a teenaged tennis player. We
are strangers, for the
most part, and only know each other in this class. It is
a comfort, to know
that we're all in this small, pleasantly warm studio
together. Like so much
else, this is new. Breathing and I have never been close friends. Sure, I
do it, just like
everyone else, but I've never spent a great deal of time
examining it, just
like almost everyone else. But, now, I can't escape
thinking about the
simple movement of air into my body and back out again.
I can focus simply
on how air feels like when it moves and what temperature
it is as it glides
over my upper lip. It's odd to think so hard about
something that is so
firmly hardwired into being alive. More than a decade ago, massage school gave me my
earliest breathing
lessons, which I failed. Somehow, to my physically-bound
brain, isolated in
its hard shell of bone and fascia, something so simple
as what one's lungs
were doing felt divorced from the earthy and concrete
anatomy of the human
body. My in-class massages were described as excellent
in terms of
manipulating soft tissues and understanding muscular
structure. What was
missing from my bodywork was my heart, my spirit. Both
stayed locked in my
chest, unwilling to travel down my arms to my client. I
quit learning just
short of being licensed, citing an unwillingness to make
my living touching
naked strangers. While that was a large part of it,
granted, I also was
afraid of being that open, of not being able to hide
behind my knowledge of
how humans were assembled and suddenly being jerked into
the vulnerable
space where humans feel.
(continued at right)
Time, as it does, passed. Eight years and a developing
writing career later,
though a series of kismetic events, I found myself
taking yoga. We were a
solid match, Iyengar-style asanas and I. Iyengar's
devotion to proper form
and physiology overcame all of my initial reluctance
about the ethereal
spiritually espoused by some yoginis. My first yoga
teacher would speak
casually of "pranayama," the practice of
moving breath and new-agey energy
around. But, apart from reminders that one should think
about breathing in
every pose, no matter how active, we didn't spend much
time tinkering with
the energy itself. I learned the nuts-and-bolts of the
basic asanas as best
as I was able, then started to think about integrity and
flow. Breathing, I
thought, was something to be dealt with much, much
later, when my anatomy
knew what it was doing. Just as I was ready to graduate
to the next series
of classes, where, I assume, the focus was less on form
and more on
function, I packed up my house and trucked it 800 miles
away to a small town
where yoga instructors are as difficult to find as
decent Thai food. Again, like a housecat searching for a head-scratch, the
cosmos nudged. The
local daily paper ran an ad for a free yoga class in a
studio I had not
previously known of that also happened to be just a few
blocks from my new
home. It wasn't Iyengar, to say the least. Part of my brain
was convinced that all
yoga was the same and I was slightly stunned to discover
that not every
school moved the same limbs the same way. My new
instructor is a devotee of
Vinyasa, a style more concerned with flow rather than
hard-assed about form.
That first day, we spent the first ten minutes breathing -- really breathing
-- feeling what it is like to fill your lungs and
empty them again.
No postures. No fiddly adjustments to same. Just in and
out, while we sat in
Simple Cross-legged Pose in a small room filled with
natural light. It felt
like coming home. Week by week, pieces fit into my understanding of pranayama. While I still
feel like a big doofus when doing it, my Breath of Fire (kapalabhati)
ignites some long untouched well of energy and my
alternate nostril
breathing clears my head of all of the goo that
accumulates during a long,
northeastern winter. I can apply them with enough
integrity that I can feel
my own energy roiling
in my belly (its existence still feels amusing to
discuss, like I should
change my name to Rainbow and buy some crystals). It is
a surprise, this awareness of what a little breathing
can do, how it fuels
my practice and moves it comfortably into the places
that I find
uncomfortable. My feelings. My spirit. My heart. My
journeys are buoyed by
the breathing of my fellow students, even the guy who
grunts make me want to
giggle and point. Their breath twines with mine and
fills the peaceful
studio like waves. We are all breathing, in and out,
touching without
touching, moving nothing more tangible than air.
__________________________________________
About the Author:
Adrienne Martini has been a theatre technician, apprentice massage therapist,
bookstore bookkeeper and pizza joint waitress. Eventually, someone started paying her for her words and an editorial mercenary was
born. She has written theatre reviews and features for the Austin
Chronicle, blurbs about tofurkey and bottled water for Cooking Light and a piece about
knitting summer camp for Interweave Knits. She is a former editor for Knoxville, Tennessee's
Metro Pulse and recently picked up an AAN award for feature writing. During the day, she fields freelance gigs and crams
knowledge into the heads of college students in Upstate New York. At all hours, she is mom to Maddy, and wife to Scott. Email Adrienne at: shaken@austinmama.com
