mr.news no. 15: Inhale, and Exhale…Then Lose Your Mind!
Hi Misters,
I have emerged from a deep zombified state induced by grad school classes, classroom prep, and Georgia in August.
It is hot. A stuffy Southern humidity you can only be bred to love. Everyone is tacked together like sticky hands thrown at the ceiling. The sweat headaches remain, but the grunt work is mostly done. The kids are back in the classroom, and they have, quite literally, jolted me awake.
Grad school is doing what I was told it would do: peaks of existential crisis accompanied by a persistent drum of tinnitus. My mind has become a maze of questions about education and our capacity to imagine futures. There’s nothing fully formed at the end of this maze, but there are these little glowing reflections of hope, humanity, and cooperation that I see most clearly in the child.
When these swirling interrogations grow until they have nowhere to land, a student laughs, completely bewildered, because they discovered you can calculate a tree’s age by its rings. Or one falls completely silent, transfixed by the working hand of a peer. And suddenly, I am settled.
Still, the trilling urge to sell all my belongings and move to a remote cabin remains. Or better yet, become a rock or a dewdrop.
But since abandoning society is currently incompatible with my life, I’ve been returning to mindfulness instead.
Here are a few meditation and breath practices that help me remain corporeal.
1. Shared Breath
I fell in love with this practice from Emergence Magazine’s Breath: A Remembering Earth Practice. You sit, preferably outside, and breathe with an awareness that your breath is not entirely your own. Really visualize this. What you exhale is taken in by plants, trees, the ocean, and other beings. What they release returns to you. Over and over. Remember that our breath is a reciprocal act with the entire living world.
I love doing this outside and letting the boundary between myself and everything around me start to fizz.
Emergence also has 50 Seasonal Meditations on their website. I could not recommend them enough.
2. Meditation Walk
Classic. Go for a walk. Take two sharp breaths in through your nose, followed by one long exhale through your nose. I’m pretty sure this is the recommended breathing technique for runners. As someone who suffers from a chronically stuffy nose, I find this technique reminds me how to breathe properly after stints of shallow, open-mouth breathing.
I especially like this one when I can’t be assed to sit still.
3. Nadi Shodhana
Alternate-nostril breathing. Sit comfortably. Close one nostril with your finger and breathe through the other, then switch, moving the breath slowly from side to side. This is a pranayama practice.
Physically following the breath with my hand gives my brain just enough of a task to stop wandering elsewhere.
4. Go Dancing
To be spiritually sound, I've made an effort to lose my mind every couple of weeks, and I’m claiming dancing as a breath practice.
Go to the club. Dance until you’re liquid. Feel your lungs working. Breathe deeply. Notice the shared breath of a room full of people moving, laughing, sweating, bumping into each other. Maybe have a cheeky kiss and pass that breath of life, gifted to you by the universe, back and forth again and again.
Pure magic.
5. Viparita Karani
The feeling of this technique can be equated to your favorite crawlspace as an overwhelmed kid. Lie on the floor with your legs resting up against a wall. Place one hand over your heart and the other on your stomach. Breathe deeply and slowly enough that you can feel your hands rise and fall with your body.
Gravity aligns your hips and spine perfectly to the ground; everything feels heavy. You become your own weighted blanket. I do this right before bed, and it knocks me right out.
Once you feel settled, catch up on all the Mister happenings of this week. We are still on a Baltimore high from nat raum’s incredible syllabus, which has us all searching for the cheapest and fastest plane tickets to BWI. On Mister Web, Dale Scherfling re-narrates the biblical creation story through Sisters.
Happy breathing, dancing, and reading. Love ya!
Kisses,
Fatima
WEEKLY READING
From Tima:
Time is the thing the body moves through by T. Fleischmann
From PJ:
The Bell by Iris Murdoch
Indifference: On the Praxis of Interspecies Being by Naisargi N. Davé
A Burst of Light by Audre Lorde
