Plenty of Green to Breath

Speaking of plenty, no one ever worries about having too much green outside because nature comes in color, and green, associated with the element of air, prosperity, abundance,, and our heart chakra, is the color of life, making good on its promise to keep the world alive.

Making air unconditionally abundant for every living creature, great and small.

“The force that through the green fuse drives the flower,” as Dylan Thomas once said.

Chlorophyll takes light, something we cannot hold, and turns it into something we can live by. Food. Growth. Oxygen.

Our very next breath depends on it. 

The first yoga teacher I ever worked with was in 2008, after the market crashed, when yoga started to become a popular core and strengthening exercise. Before that, the random yoga classes I had taken throughout the years did not make me want to come back because everything about it was unfamiliar and confusing.

I was leery of its religious roots, and holding poses as a form of exercise did not make any sense. The names of the poses alone take a long time to remember, and no one ever slows down to help you pronounce them or spell them out.

There were more fun ways to stay in shape.

When a new yoga studio opened in town, a friend of mine who was recovering from cancer asked me to go with her. Of course, I said yes. To get ready and not look like a fool, I booked a one-on-one with the studio owner to review the basics, which helped.

In modern yoga, a yoga instructor usually leads group yoga classes at a yoga studio or a gym. In traditional yoga, a dedicated yoga practitioner, known as a yogi, helps guide other students on the path of yoga, both on and off the yoga mat.

I did not know I was about to step onto the path of yoga, or that many teachers and yogis would come into my life to help me grow on and off the mat.

In the next few years, I attended several studios with different philosophies, teachers, and yogis. I learned about chakras, chi, energy, and alignment. My practice got more manageable, and I got stronger and more flexible.

When I participated in a class with a teacher who gave us a very unconventional exercise to do, I understood the real power of yoga was the breath.

This was the first time I experienced yoga as a fully integrated body-mind-spirit journey and meditation practice called breath work.

Instead of starting with warm-up exercises or sun salutations, the yogi told us we would do a breath and heart chakra exercise. She gathered the class in a circle and asked us to choose a partner.

I turned to the person on my left and immediately chose her as my person. She was a lovely woman in her 60s with shoulder-length salt-and-pepper hair, blue eyes, and glasses. Something about her presence told me she had been doing yoga for a long time, and clearly, I was a newbie. I felt confident she was familiar with these types of exercises.

The teacher instructed us to place our hands on each other, on both sides of our rib cage, two to three inches under the armpits. We were to start breathing together, with one another’s breath, until it felt like our breath was one and the same, at the same depth and timing, in harmony.

My partner and I looked at each other, smiled, and put our hands where they were supposed to.

We took one breath together. Her breath was vast and endless, while mine desperately gasped for more air because it ran out of breath. I was instantly jolted into distress.

On the second try, I blew my heart chakra wide open.

What happened next went something like this. I felt a release in my chest, causing my body to start shaking and my eyes to cry to the point of heaving uncontrollably. It was unstoppable. I was not sad that day. No emotion was attached to it.

I had absolutely no control over what was happening.

I kept covering my eyes with one hand and waving the other in front of me in a gesture that hopefully signaled to everyone how sorry I was that I could not stop. When that did not work, I turned around to face away from the group until I calmed down.

When I finally stopped, the teacher said this was not unusual. My heart was releasing suffering. I did not even know I had to make room for love, peace, and harmony.

I finished the exercise and breathed in synchronicity with this stranger.

Several years later, I saw a pink crayon do the same thing to someone else during a mandala exercise.

Breath becomes shorter and harder where there is no room to grow. And in a constricted space, our minds and bodies, our souls, will twist themselves into gnarly shapes we no longer recognize, distorted by what seems to be a hard shell.

We learn to hold our breath to protect a layer of thin skin we have built ourselves from the repetition of injuries we have not dealt with over time. Little tears, scarred together in a layer, unable to release our true loving nature from our diaphragms.

These small breath movements pain us so much that our breath becomes shallower and shallower.

We are born to breathe deeply. We have to breathe deep to push life through. Then, push through life breathing.

Since we cannot breathe deeply without pain, we scream, yell, or withhold our pain by withholding our love. Our pain hurts others with our irritability, sadness, and helplessness.

These are the ways we try to escape when we cannot trust our hearts or the hearts of others. As a result, we try to control the space we have been given and our nature, and we refuse to grow because all it does is cause pain.

You cannot breathe someone else’s breath, and no one can breathe for you.

This meditation taught me that air is unconditional, a perfect metaphor for unconditional love, abundantly available to us at all times.

Breathing deeply is an act of relishing our mortality and being alive. Good for our body, mind, and soul, but good for the world. That's the work.

Connecting to my breath is how I began to connect to another, through breath, and then the rest of the world.

Green rarely feels like too much. It feels like enough. More than enough, abundance.

Coloring is an act of belonging. You are the palette.

BELONG | COLOR