This morning, as I breathed, I imagined that I was inhaling fresh new vitality with each breath, and expelling old, stale energy with each exhalation.  At times I felt as if all my pores were open to release the previous breath, and with it old energies that had become habitual—concepts, fears, reflexes—and thus worked against a desirable spontaneity.  Even my fingertips felt open as I released old ways from my body.  I was leaking self from my fingertips, and for a few moments in this morning’s sitting there was a great sense of release and of openness.

These experiences were inspired by Thomas Cleary’s translation of Ten Questions from the Mawangdui texts of ancient Taoism.*  In Question 4 Rong Cheng discourses to the Yellow Emperor on the preservation of vitality in the body:

The way to collect energy is to cause it to reach the extremities, so that vitality arises without deficiency […] Stale energy makes for aging, fresh energy makes for longevity.  Therefore, those who are skilled at governing their energy cause stale energy to disperse nightly, and gather fresh energy in the morning, so as to clear the apertures of the body and replenish the internal organs […]

            The aim of morning breathing is that the exhalations should conform to nature, while the inhalations should fill the lungs, as if being stored in a profound abyss.  Then old energy will be used up daily and new energy will be replenished daily.  Then the physical body will be lustrous and radiant, filled with vitality, and thus able to live long. (422)

The instructions are obscure, certainly, so I took them as inspiration for a meditation generally rather than as specific practice.  In the context of Ten Questions most of the breathing practices align with broader instructions about sexual health and its relation to vital energies.  Nevertheless, as I meditated it was easy to think of each exhalation as a purgation of old ideas, dried-out habits of thought and experience, expectations that had arisen from previous times of sadness or upset and that lingered in my being to limit my sense of what the future might be.  In short, all habits of mind and thought, expectations and fears and desires, that work against a genuinely spontaneous experience of the world.  It was these that I imagined being flushed from my fingertips as each old breath escaped my body.  And with each new breath something fresh, open-ended, and spontaneous filled me.

This experience teaches me that my readings can indeed help me to reimagine what meditation is for, to experience anew the way it works with my body towards renewal.  I don’t take any of these metaphoric ideas of inhalation and exhalation as fact, nor do I expect to profit from them in each meditation in the future (for that would not conduce to spontaneity).  If these ways of understanding breathing practice are not “true,” they are at least deeply useful.

* In The Taoist Classics: The Collected Translations of Thomas Cleary, vol. 1

28 September, 2024.