Breathing easy

The beauty of gifts that we actually want and need

I discovered this image in a hidden gem of an art gallery, in the tiny town of Confluence, PA, by the wonderful artist Emily Schubert.¹ I didn’t have words for it at the time, but it captured something deep, and I gazed at it for a long time. Then, this week,

Stephenie G.

wrote something that helped me find words: “my heart and lungs longed to align to your beat and breath.”

The image captures the way my spirit feels when my “beat and breath” aligns, finally, with Mama Spirit’s.

As I’ve unearthed Her story, I found Her reflected in trees. Going back to antiquity, people have looked to the old growth trees to find the sacred feminine. I have found Her there too. Last winter, I discovered a practice of praying while leaning on a tree. During this odd practice, my breath and beat aligns with Hers. The tree imparts a sense of ease, until I feel the Spirit’s roots grow into my lungs and Her breath becomes my breath.

Jesus looked to the Holy Spirit as the source of hope for humanity. John tells us “he breathed on them and said, “receive the Holy Spirit.” When we learn to align our breath to the One we look to as our source, we fulfill Jeremiah’s promise that “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts.” The law is Love, and its truest form is reflected as a deep, mutual partnership.

This imprint of Love is indelible, but like invisible ink, it only appears in certain contexts. It surfaces in times of ease, and is obscured in times of fear and anxiety. Cultivating a state of ease is a spiritual practice that allows us to embody Love. Ease is the “Sabbath-rest” referred to in the letter to the Hebrews, “There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God. Make every effort to enter that rest.”

The habit of our minds tends toward fear and anxiety. In some cases, we may only be able to rest when we have exhausted all our energy, and even then, our sleep is restless. Yet we can experience rest, or ease, when we are already rested and full of energy. Ease is a state of continual rest, even as we go through the cycle of spending our energy and recharging. In this state of rest, we are curious and full of whimsy, playful and ready to offer a kind word or lend a hand. We explore and have deep thoughts. Poems surface. We snap photos of a flash of beauty. We experience ease even as we do the challenging work of loving a broken world, partnering to change broken systems, or caring for the sick, lonely, outcast, and troubled. Ease, rest, and peace are synonyms, and they are the gifts of Mama Spirit.

These gifts of the Spirit are breathed into us when we align our breath and beat to our Creator’s, as a newborn child does to her mother’s. It regulates our nervous system so that we experience a sense of safety, and the imprint of Love becomes a vivid inscription on our hearts, pulsing with color and life.

“Make every effort to enter that rest.” It’s counterintuitive, right? Using effort to find rest? Yet, I know that rest doesn’t always come when we want it to.

There is a virtuous cycle that occurs when we cultivate ease, so that it takes less effort to maintain over time. The overflow of love that pours out in times of ease is so satisfying that practices are not disciplines so much as daily bread that I hunger for. My practice of purposeful alignment, whether you call it contemplation, prayer, meditation, or mindfulness, is like the ice cream we crave on a hot summer night. It is the daily habit…no, treat…that allows me to live by the Spirit.

This life of rest, ease, and peace is what I mean by “living their calling together by the Spirit” in my working definition of my approach to spirituality.

Partnership spirituality (noun): a movement to empower all people to embrace a partnership of healthy masculinity and femininity within themselves, their relationships, families, and communities, to have agency and live their calling together by the Spirit, by lovingly and humbly examining the cultural forces of domination.

A friend and I were talking recently and they said they didn’t think they “lived by the Spirit.” I asked them to say more. We both spent time in the same charismatic community, and they understood “living by the Spirit” as being able to hear internal messages or promptings, and explicitly interpreting these as from the Spirit. I asked them about their practice of walking with prayer beads, and spending time walking prayer labyrinths. “What is that experience like for you?” They told me it gave them a sense of peace. Yes, I thought. It is as simple as that. We don’t need to expressly assign our thoughts as the Spirit’s thoughts. If we are at peace, the imprint of Love on our hearts becomes more pronounced, and we live by the Spirit, whether we use that language or not.

Whether you use beads, or labyrinths, or tree leaning, or a sacred text, or breathwork, or a candle, or a long walk in the woods, I pray you find your daily bread of peace. Perhaps an image of our lungs permeated by the roots of a tree can inspire you to enter that rest.

1. I didn’t understand what I was seeing at the time. I thought it was a giant black and white mural. I thought to myself, “Why no color?” After looking her up online, I discovered that it was a form of visual storytelling called “crankies,” using a scroll that is wound onto two spools and viewed in a box with a window, almost like a film! I was astounded. What a beautiful craft.