Conscious, healthy breathing helps make us aware not only of our own presence but also that of all that lives and all that we share. View the study sheet here. Watch the recording here.
The next time you are in an argument with someone, notice your breathing. Is your breathing slow and even or rapid and irregular? Healthy breathing maintains an appropriate balance between oxygen and carbon dioxide in the body. Agitation, anxiety, fear can cause this balance to get out of whack. Less oxygen makes its way to the brain. We experience unpleasant sensations, including dizziness, increased heart rate and blurred vision, which can cause us to function at less than optimal levels. Clarity of perception and soundness of decision making are degraded. In short, we make poor choices.
Increasing numbers of studies show not only that emotional states influence respiratory patterns but also that respiratory patterns influence emotional states. Conscious modulation of breathing toward a slower and deeper pattern can strengthen positive emotions and restore clarity of senses and decision making.
There are several examples in the Bible of a modulation in the narrative’s pulse in response to violent and reactive behavior. They are attempts to restore a healthy balance of levels of spiritual oxygen and carbon dioxide. Two occur in this week’s Torah portion, Parshat Pinchas. The previous portion, Balak, ended in a frenzy of anger, mass death, and a shocking stabbing by Aaron’s grandson Pinchas of an Israelite man and a Moabite woman while they were having sex. Almost as if spent by this convulsion of violence, the Torah then goes still. It pauses.
On the page that pause consists of empty space equaling about twenty letters. In terms of time it lasts for hours, from the portion’s final reading on Shabbat morning until the beginning of the next Torah portion is read at the Shabbat afternoon service. Torah’s shock at what happened is finally broken at the opening of the next portion by the divine voice saying that Pinchas is to be given God’s “pact of shalom(peace/wholeness).” As filtered through midrashic lenses, this seems less like a reward than a referral to rehabilitation.
A second pause in the flow of the narrative appears in the form of five Israelite daughters. Haunting the Israelites has been an unexpressed anxiety about who would lead them ever since it was announced two portions ago that Moses would not. Pinchas seems a likely choice. He is the grandson of Aaron. He has received God’s “pact of shalom.” Rather than rushing impulsively forward with such an anointing, Torah takes time out to count. A census of the whole community is taken, a project taking about forty-six verses. At its conclusion the five daughters of Zelophehad step forward.
These five sisters argue that their dead father’s portion of land in Canaan should go to them since he died without any sons. It is a proposal that had never been considered before. It is a disruption of the norm. However, they present their case calmly. They act respectfully towards the existing leadership structure and frame their position as an honoring of tradition rather than an overthrow of it. Their claim works no violence. It seeks to heal a communal fissure caused by their father’s death. God proclaims their plea to be just.
Immediately after episode with the daughters of Zelophehad, the community returns to the issue of communal leadership. God identifies Joshua ben Nun as Moses’ successor. Where does he fit into the hierarchy of Israelite life? What tribe does he come from that he should lead the nation? Joshua is from the tribe of Ephraim, one who was born in exile in Egypt, outside the land of Israel. But Joshua had watched and attended to Moses. He learned from him not to fear but to welcome the spread of divine wisdom, once the sole possession of Moses, among seventy community leaders. A new, expanding model of leadership begins to develop with Joshua.
The quality that Moses wishes for his successor is that he be one who will “go out before them and come in before them,” who will “take them out and bring them back.” This is the language of a healthy respiratory system: inhalation and exhalation, inspiration and expiration. With the body Israel returned to healthy stabilization, the community can return to its life-sustaining rituals of offerings to the Source of all life. And so the portion ends.
Ten years ago the Danish artist Jeppe Hein suffered an emotional breakdown. To restore himself he began a practice of conscious breathing. He incorporated the technique into his artwork. Initially, he did this through a series of “Breathing Watercolors,” where the lengths and depths of his breathing guided the execution of his brushstrokes. He then began to invite visitors to his exhibitions to do the same, to paint their breath on canvasses set up on the walls.
This act of focusing on and painting their breath was transformative both individually and collectively for the participants. Hein said, “I try to encourage people to focus on their body and mind at the present moment and to enter into an inner dialogue. By painting their own breath onto a medium, they will not only be able to experience their breath, body and mind in the here and now, but also be part of a collectively experienced moment with their environment.”
Hein’s work became a global engagement art project known as Breathe with Me. In partnership with Art 2030, a nonprofit organization that works with art to inspire action for a sustainable future, Breathe with Me was launched at the United Nations’ Youth Climate Summit in 2019. Dignitaries and diplomats painted their own breath on an undulating canvas wall weaving its ways through the lobby of the UN headquarters.
Subsequent to the UN presentation, Hein turned his project into a larger installation in Central Park. The public was invited to paint their breath over six large canvas waves, spanning 600 feet and winding its way through the park. For Hein, the goal was to have the public visualize the invisible, “our breath and the resulting relation between us, reminding us to cooperate if we want to share this world together today and in the future. Ideally, it will encourage people to conspire, as in Latin conspirare means to breathe together.”
The next time you are in an argument with someone, notice your breathing. And notice theirs also. The goal is not to exacerbate (or bring about a cessation of!) their breathing. It is to find some way to breathe together.
Join us here at 7:00 p.m. (PDT) Thursday July 21 as we explore learning to breathe together.
