Insights from Breath Meditation

Becoming aware of my relationships
I live in a spiritual community where we try to become more aware of our relationship with the world around us.
Through the work we do to make a living and our relationships with the people we live and work with, we try to observe ourselves, recognize our shortcomings and limits and go beyond them, so we can do a better job at living.
We try to identify in our own lives the patterns of behavior that negatively affect our immediate surroundings and, by extension, humanity as a whole.
To help us do this, we have time set aside everyday for meditation. It’s a moment to reflect on the way we live and our place in the scheme of things. In this way we can learn from life and consciously try to adjust to what we see.
Sitting in Silence and Breathing
At one point I experimented with the practice of just sitting in silence and focusing on my breathing.
This is a common meditation practice that can help to expand our consciousness. The practice, as I understand it, is to focus the mind on the rhythm of one’s breathing.
After a short period of time, thoughts will interrupt your concentration as your mind tends to wander off in one direction or the other depending on your mental habits. When you realize that you have lost your concentration on your breathing, you gently go back to focusing on it.
When you try to discipline your mind in this manner, you become conscious of many things about your mind and your thoughts that you were previously oblivious to. It is a very simple practice that contains profound teachings.
But this is not the point of this essay.

Missing the Bigger Picture
As I focused on my breathing and then became distracted by thoughts and returned to my breathing, it dawned on me that I was missing a much bigger picture.
I was concentrating on myself, my breathing, and my thoughts, but there was something much bigger there. I was missing the elephant in the room: the air itself.
The air, something we can only live minutes without, was something I was only vaguely aware of at best. It went almost completely unnoticed. I was looking for a way to connect to the oneness of things, how we are all connected, how everything is connected.
And to my surprise I found it!
Everyone Breathes All the Time
We can’t stop breathing or we would die in very short order. We are generally not aware of it because we are focused on other things. It is so important it can’t be dependent on our conscious effort; it has to be automatic. But if we stop to observe, there it is.
Every living being on the planet is totally dependent on air.
What could be more universal than that?
How did this all come about? What is this thing called air and where did it come from and how has it figured into life itself?
The story of air is a fascinating interplay of circumstances.
Cosmic Creation: from Fire to Air
How did it happen that I am sitting in a sea of air right now inhaling and exhaling it, to stay alive?
Well, to find answers, I googled it and the story goes like this:
The current scientific thinking states that around five billion years ago our solar system formed from a cloud of cosmic gas and dust called a solar nebula. A shock wave from a nearby supernova explosion probably initiated the collapse of the solar nebula. The sun formed in the center and the planets formed in a thin disc orbiting around it.
At the center, gravity pulled more and more material in. Eventually, the pressure in the core was so great that hydrogen atoms began to combine and form helium, releasing an enormous amount of energy. With that, the Sun was born, and it eventually amassed more than 99% of the available matter.
Matter farther out in the disk was also clumping together. This hot mix of gases and solid clumps smashed into one another, eventually forming larger and larger objects. Some of them grew big enough for their gravity to shape them into spheres, thus becoming planets. Of course, one of those planets is what we so affectionally call the Earth, this place where we live and breathe.
What do we breathe? The atmosphere. Air is the atmosphere.

Atmosphere Forms on Earth
In the beginning the Earth had almost no atmosphere. The surface was molten. As earth cooled, an atmosphere started to form from gases spewed from the volcanoes that covered the Earth’s surface. It included hydrogen sulfide, methane, and ten to two hundred times as much carbon dioxide as today’s atmosphere. These gases were held to the earth’s surface by gravity. After about half a billion years, Earth’s surface cooled and solidified.
The cooling also caused the water vapor in that early atmosphere to condense and fall as rain, endowing the planet with liquid water which collected in the lower areas forming our oceans, rivers, and streams. (We live near the banks of the Hudson River in New York which is now about a mile wide!)
The size and energy of the Sun and our distance from it, plus the stabilizing thermal effect of the gases present in the atmosphere, determine the temperature that we experience on the surface where we live.
These are the conditions, above all: temperature, atmosphere, and the abundance of water.
All together they made it possible for life as we know it to form.
Everything was “just right”
Just to stress this point and give it some context, we can look at Venus.
Venus is practically the twin of our Earth. Both are approximately the same size and formed at the same time.
Many astronomers think that Venus underwent the same evolution as Earth; the formation, the volcanic activity, and the condensation of the water vapor, but there was one big difference. Venus was situated slightly closer to the Sun in its orbit which made it hotter. This temperature difference, among other factors, eventually caused the evaporation of its water and the resulting conditions could never give birth to life as occurred on Earth.
But on Earth, like Baby Bear’s porridge, everything was “just right”.
Bluish-green microscopic organisms called cyanobacteria flourished in Earth’s oceans. They made gaseous or free oxygen from carbon dioxide, water, and sunlight- the process called photosynthesis. As cyanobacteria created more free oxygen, the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere eventually reached 1% of today’s level, which is 21%.
This was, by the way, about 2.7 billion years ago.

Co-evolution of Life on Earth and its Atmosphere
This brings me to the central aspect of this story of air and life on Earth.
Life and atmosphere evolved together.
They were not independent of each other, they “co-evolved”.
Tiny life forms produced oxygen. This altered the composition of the atmosphere. This alteration allowed those life forms to develop into more complex organisms which in turn grew and produced even more oxygen. More life forms continued to evolve, and the great circle of life grew.
So the life forms, the plants and animals, including us, have shaped and been shaped by the atmosphere.
We are intimately and reciprocally connected with air and have been since the beginning.
Over time, tiny photosynthetic organisms produced enough oxygen to react with methane in the atmosphere, transforming it forever. About two billion years ago, the methane haze cleared, and the sky turned blue.
As oxygen levels in the oceans rose, this boon favored the evolution of lifeforms that could use oxygen to create energy. At this point in time most aerobic life forms lived in the oceans and used oxygen dissolved in sea water. Then about 430 million years ago the amount of oxygen molecules was so great that O3 ozone began to form and created the ozone layer in the upper atmosphere that filtered out the deadly ultraviolet rays of the Sun and allowed life to leave the protection of the sea and move out onto land.
Plant life began, and animal life followed.
Energy from the Sun
Plants use photosynthesis to produce carbohydrates from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and energy from the Sun. A byproduct of photosynthesis is oxygen. Animals (including us) use oxygen to release energy from proteins, fats and carbohydrates in food, a process called metabolism. Metabolism in our bodies cells produces water and carbon dioxide, which our bodies excrete. As plants became firmly established on land the levels of oxygen rose dramatically.
Even rocks store air …

The first first free oxygen was actually absorbed by rocks. Hence the abundance of red rocks on our planet. The oxygen which was produced by photosynthesis ended up combining with the iron in the rocks forming iron oxide. Okay, but the curious part is that when I commented this to a friend who is a physician, he said “Hey, that’s the way hemoglobin works. Hemoglobin contains iron which allows it to pick up oxygen from the air we breath and deliver it everywhere in the body.”
In the 4.6 billion years of Earth’s history, the composition of the atmosphere has changed from a hazy, unfamiliar mix to today’s mostly blue skies. As the atmosphere developed, life began and evolved. The evolution of living things in turn changed the atmosphere, and those changes then altered life. As far as we know, this relationship of co-evolution is unique to our planet.
Breathing connects us to the Universe
So, the simple act of our breathing the air in our atmosphere is connected to the greater universe, the formation and evolution of the solar system, to all forms of life that have existed and now exist on our planet. And we are, surprisingly for the most part, oblivious in our everyday consciousness to these connections. We hardly ever recognize the fact that we live in a sea of air that is crucial to our minute-to-minute survival. And the same is true for every other living thing on the earth.
What else could we be missing?
At times we become aware of the air but mostly we ignore it as if it wasn’t even there. Here are a few examples from my own experience.
When I was a kid I frequently rode in the front seat of the car with my dad. When he smoked, the smoke would fill the car but for, at that time, some inexplicable reason, if I opened the little vent window, in those days, cars had little vent windows, to my amazement the smoke would be visibly sucked out of the car.
In high school Mr. Di, our physics teacher, drew on his overhead projector the shape of the cross section of an airplane wing. The underside of the wing was almost a straight line but in contrast the top surface curved gently upward. So as the wing cut through the air, the air passing above the wing had to travel faster than the air passing below because it had more distance to cover.
How can airplanes fly?
He was teaching us a rule of physics. “A moving fluid has less pressure”. The difference of the speed of the air passing above and below the wing sucks and pushes the wing upwards. So, the air which appears to be almost nothing can lift a fully loaded plane weighing around 1,000,000 lbs. It’s the same principle as the smoke being sucked out through the vent window. The air is really something!
A few more examples that were very surprising to me at the time.
Air Power
I lived for many years in a rural community in Colombia, South America. We raised honeybees to generate income from the sale of the honey and for our own consumption. But the wooden hives that were available were made with wood and tended to warp and deform over time. So, we decided to build our own hives using seasoned lumber which was stable and did not warp and deform. Eventually we were encouraged by other beekeepers to build hives for them, which turned into the major source of income for the community.
A big carpentry shop creates a lot of sawdust, wood shavings and dust. So, we decided to install a vacuum system to draw all of this out of the shop. We bought a used industrial blower from a secondhand scrapyard and what we thought was a powerful electric motor to drive it. When we turned on the system the motor overheated because it was not powerful enough to drive the air through the ductwork. The air was substantial enough to styme a large three-phase electric motor. I was shocked.
The wind, air in motion, blows down barns, rips up trees, drives windmills and sailboats, clears the air and, back in the days of the vent window mystery, woke up everyone in the house when as a hurricane it drove the black walnuts from the tree next to our house into the wooden siding with loud thuds.
Air has power.
Breath is life
On our farm, we raise a flock of Katahdin sheep. Yesterday the last ewe to give birth this year had three lambs. We had to help her some because one of the lambs was in the wrong position in the birth canal.

While the lambs are still inside their mother each one is enclosed in an amniotic sac filled with fluid. They can’t breathe; they receive oxygen by way of the placenta from the mother’s blood through the umbilical cord. When she pushes them out into the world the umbilical cord breaks, oxygen is thus cut off and this triggers their struggle to breathe. Generally, they thrash around to break the membrane that encloses them, struggling for that first breath of air. They sneeze and they cry to open the air pathways and mama licks them aggressively to clean off the fluid and get them moving. If for some reason she is distracted by another lamb and the lamb is not strong enough to break out of the sac it dies in a few minutes from asphyxiation.
Luckily our last little lamb breathed on time, and is thriving today.
Air and Weather

The air also plays a huge role in our lives and those of all living beings because it’s where the weather occurs. It holds the moisture in clouds and delivers the rain that allows the plants to grow. El Nino, the Gulf Steam, temperature changes, high atmospheric pressure and low-pressure centers draw it from one place to another in complex and ever-changing weather patterns that can sustain life or bring disaster.
With this understanding things have changed for me.
Still, most of the time I continue to be unconscious of the presence and importance of the air.
It’s part of the makeup of our consciousness, I guess. We need to focus on other things. But now when I see a bird or insect fly it almost always prompts me to remember the air.
I have a simple feeling of connection with everything through my breathing.
The consciousness of something bigger and more profound seems to be the basis of life itself. That’s a good thing, a very positive feeling.
Our connection through breathing is evident.
Many speculative theories, especially in organized religion and spiritual thought, can only be sustained by faith, divine commands, and invisible beings.
That never seemed believable to me.
In contrast these understandings about the air are evident.
Air is all around us. We can’t exist without it. Life, our life, all life, plant and animal life, has evolved because it is there. Without it there would be no life as we know it, no us.
I stop for a moment and witness my breathing, and it all comes into focus. It’s that simple. It’s the story of life on earth. No leap of faith required.
Interconnection and Interdependence
This gives me the simple feeling of connection with everything. Becoming aware of my breathing gave me an awareness of the interdependence and interconnectedness of life, the atmosphere, and planet Earth.
I’m no expert on Spinoza’s concept of God, but from what I do understand, it feels like I’m pulling on a thread that somehow connects to it. God is everything.

Final thoughts:
The Earth’s atmosphere is an extremely thin sheet of air extending from the surface of the Earth to the edge of space. The Earth is a sphere with a roughly 8000-mile diameter; the thickness of the atmosphere is about 60 miles. Astronauts describe it as looking like the skin on an apple. Such a thin layer. Our lives depend on it.
It is this thin layer that connects everything.
We are one with it all.
I woke up this morning mulling these ideas over and heard the cool air entering the room through the air conditioning vent.
Only then did I remember that I was breathing to stay alive.
This gives me the simple feeling of connection with everything.
What started as paying attention to my breathing became an awareness of the great interdependence of my life, the atmosphere, and our planet Earth.
I am so glad it happened!
I hope this little story helps you connect to the rest of your life also.
About the Author(s)
William Dailey took his first breath in February of 1947. Entered a rural spiritual community in Colombia in 1973. Moved to a community in Tivoli, New York in 1990, where he lives and breathes today.