Breathing.

Learning from others while also discovering our own truths adds to our existence. Breathing may be the ignition which jumpstarts and stops the link between our biology, our bodies, and our mind/souls, our metaphysical self.

Scientists claim that intellect does not require biology to exist. Our mind can exist within something other, something else. Our biology becomes our physical self. Our intellect/spirit is metaphysical and maybe independent from each other until foreign elements incite them to connect. I wonder and speculate if that inciting element is the act of breathing. That first and last breath that comprises that which we call life.

Yes, that fanny slap shortly after our birth brings the reaction to our first breath and just maybe opens the portal for the metaphysical part of our existence to take root.

Once fanny slapped off we go to live our life until that time that our biology interrupts the breathing process and the two parts separate.

My thinking zigzagged into these theories putting together pieces of science with philosophy. It would be a very long walk to prove this but to my minds eye the pieces fit and are worthy of further thought and exploration. Does breathing ignite the connection between our body and our souls?

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that examines the fundamental nature of reality, including the relationship between mind and matter, between substance and attribute, and between potentiality and actuality. (Wikipedia).

Carl Jung’s theories about shadows and collective unconscious were stepping stones that brought to the door of breathing as the link between body and mind/soul. It would fascinating to attempt to prove this mathematically.

A bit of research rendered some insights to my new fascination with breathing. It appears that my thinking that breathing connects body and soul isn’t original. This is some of what I found. ” One of the exceptions is the work of Irizarry (1999, 2002, 2004). She questions conventional scholarly traditions to propose an ontology of breath as a means to explore the grounds where consciousness and body meet. This offer has been extended by Skot and Helmes ( 2013), suggesting how breath can be a lens to connect dualisms such as self and other, body and spirit, and East and West. More recently, Gorska (2016) has proposed a non-univerlizing, intersectional consideration of embodiment through approaching breath as a material discursive enactment, or more specifically, how bodies enact politics through breathing. Lande’s 92007) work on breathing like a soldier has also provided ethnographic inquiry into how culture can become through the breathing in the military malice.” This is a section taken from “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Breath, Body and World” by Rebecca Oxley and Andrew Russell at Sage Journals.