A colleague caught me mid breath one day. It was one of those days that butterflies would have looked on me with mixed emotions.
On the one hand with pride: When did this caterpillar learn to flit like this?
On the other hand with amused tolerance: The half-wit seems to be forgetting the sweet joy of collecting nectar amidst pretty bright flowers, with all the fast paced flitting. Forfeiting the sweet thing about flitting – tut tut! Flutter tutter utter nutter! (I am not high up on the poems caterpillars learn to sing about when still creepy crawlies; and the butterfly metaphor only goes so far!)
Anyway, it was one of the many days in which I flitted about the old work spot tasking, multi-tasking, sub-tasking, reminding others about their tasking, setting reminders for my own tasks and so on. Thoroughly immersed in my second self that Mary Oliver so succinctly calls the Social Self…yes, it was one of those days.
Mary Oliver’s, Upstream, is a book of many marvelous essays. The essay, Of Power and Time, talks about the three selves in many of us:
•The Child Self
•The Social Self &
•The Eternal Self.
Though in the essay, Mary Oliver, refers to the Eternal Self as the artistic self, I like to interpret it as the Creative self.
• The Child Self is in us always, it never really leaves us.
• The second self is the social self. This is the do-er, the list maker, the planner, the executer.
• Then, there is the third self: the creative self, the dreamer, the wanderer.
T’was during one of these trying days that I remembered the deep breath technique my Yoga teachers had tried to teach me about. Take deep breaths, and concentrate on it filling your stomach, feel it coming in and out of your nostrils and so on. So, I started my deep breaths as I was walking from one meeting to another. Deep breath, exhale, deep breath, exhale and so on. I had thought no one watched, but one colleague caught me, and grinned. “That should be your GIF you know?” he said.
I nodded sheepishly, and went back to my brand of breath-less flitting within minutes.
Later that week-end I ran into this beautiful children’s book in the library. A book that was just waiting to be written. A beautiful capture of all the different types of breath, Alphabreaths
Written by : Christopher Willard (a clinical psychologist) & Rechtschaffen MA, Daniel (a counselor)
Illustrated by: Clifton-Brown
The book is a lovely read urging us to Breathe like a Dolphin taking a dive, or our favorite one, The Ninja Breath – silently and slowly. The illustrations too make for a marvelously relaxing read. Please check out their Youtube clip : here
Mindful breathing and Yoga are excellent concepts to teach the children, and I am always in awe of those who can take complex concepts and make them palatable for the consumption of young and old alike.
If you happen to come home and find the son and I swimming like dolphins or getting ready for a Star Trek mission on the floor while Yoga-ing along with the Cosmic Kids Yoga series by Jaime Amor , do not be alarmed. Her yoga videos are appealing and fun. If, along the way, we do something to calm ourselves down – then great, else, we have had a great time.
There are so many aspects to the Philosophy of Being (I am amused it has such a strictly medical sounding name: Ontology)
Ontology is the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being, and reading the Wikipedia page itself boggles my simple mind (A post on the Study of Philosophy is sitting up on its hind legs and begging to be written). Maybe, what is required is a Ninja Training on Ontology. Excerpt from the wiki page:
Such an understanding of ontological categories, however, is merely taxonomic, classificatory. Aristotle’s categories are the ways in which a being may be addressed simply as a being, such as:[9]
- what it is (its ‘whatness’, quiddity, haecceity or essence)
- how it is (its ‘howness’ or qualitativeness)
- how much it is (quantitativeness)
- where it is (its relatedness to other beings)
*** Taking a Y for Yawning Breath before a Z for zzzz breath about now ****
Keeping ontological explanations aside, if The Nature of Being comes down to simple techniques of breath, fluidity and movement, it makes the simplicity behind it all brilliant.
It was one of those ‘Simple is brilliant’ types of quotes that I went looking for. I know many brilliant blokes and blokees have said marvelous things about simplicity -I know old Leonardo Da Vinci said something about it, so did old man, Einstein. In any case, looking for one of those made me fumble on this one by Norwegian explorer, Thor Heyerdahl.
From Wikipedia: Thor Heyerdahl became notable for his Kon-Tiki expedition in 1947, in which he sailed 8,000 km (5,000 mi) across the Pacific Ocean in a hand-built raft from South America to the Tuamotu Islands. The expedition was designed to demonstrate that ancient people could have made long sea voyages, creating contacts between separate cultures.
I chuckled to myself on the wisdom and sarcasm of it and look forward to reading his books one day.
Nourish-n-Cherish 