Waltraud Riegger-Krause offers an article in The Main Central Jin Shin Jyutsu Newsletter issue from Summer 2010, Number 69 about the breath. This, and all issues of The Main Central, are available at http://www.jsjinc.net.

“Each Breath is unique. It was never here before; it will never be here again.” ~ Mary Burmeister

I would like to share a few thoughts about the breath. Nothing has so much to do with the NOW than the breath, as Mary expresses in the above quote.

There are many ways in which the body receives life energy. One way is through the Energy pathways with their Energy Locks, another way is through each breath. The Breath is the pulsation of life. The rhythm of inhaling and exhaling is a law of nature – like the turn of the tide and like the cycles of the seasons. It is an awakening of nature in springtime, in summer it develops its highest expansion, in fall the earth recedes the energy, and in wintertime the earth has completely inhaled the energy. Rudolf Steiner, the founder of the Anthroposophy, called this the breathing cycle of the earth.

The circulation of exhaling and inhaling, this up and downward movement like waves, is without Beginning and without Ending. It engulfs everything in life, everything we hear, everything we see and everything we feel. Man is connected to the rhythm of nature through the breathing rhythm.

The Breath comes from the 9th Depth, the formless ground before creation. Number nine is the number of the Second Depth which has to do with the physical ability to breathe. It is the birthplace of the Lung Function Energy  and Large Intestine Function Energy. The numbers for the Depths express the quality of the unmanifested aspect of each Depth. They stand for the positive quality of the Depth. Number nine is the end of a cycle and the beginning of a new, which is like exhaling and inhaling. It is like evolution and involution, like the diastolic and systolic movement of the heart. Modern embryology came to the conclusion that a universal rhythm like the heartbeat was there first, before the heart was formed.

In the Breath there is no beginning and no ending; it is infinite which is divine.

To be continued…