The Creation of Reality: an attempt to think out how breathing effects emotion
As I sit and listen to my heart beat, I notice how easy it is to tune it out.
Also, I notice how easy it is to listen in.
I wonder, how does breathing work with this?
When I listen to my breathing, I hear my heart better. And I can slow it down.
But I really have to get behind this beating. I have to hold it, and hold it. And maybe it’s stronger than I think. It might be better to just hear it as if it was slower. I’ll listen for a slow beat behind the fast beat.
I hear, that instead of hearing 4 beats as 4 beats, I can hear them as parts of one larger beat. And to delineate the larger beat, I can use my breathing. I’ll breathe one time for every 4 beats. There, a pattern, and it sounds different.
It seems as though I can almost ‘lassoo’ my heartbeats with a breath, and reign them in.
And, as my heart slows down just a bit, I suddenly take a big breath, and straighten out a bit.
I think about how my posture changes, and it feels different to sit.
And I’m reminded of how Maturana and Varela think of the organism as different layers of matter – from atoms to particles to cells to organs, etc. all the way up to biology and then to thinking processes.
And perhaps our posture is related as well. Simply another level of our body-organism.
And if our posture is related to our breathing, then it could also be related to our feeling of wellbeing in the world. The more in tune we are with our breathing and heartbeat, the more intact we are with the world. As we adjust our posture, we adjust our grasp on the world.
Of course, reality is still constantly shifting. There will always be new situations, different input, thoughts arise, emotions disturb, tensions tense. These input affect us on a basic physiological level, setting off the need to urgently recalibrate the system. Then – stop – see what’s going on with the heart and breathing, and calm again.
How do these aspects inform our bodily gestures?
In what way are our gestures related to our breathing? And on the other hand – in what way are our gestures related to our perceptions and beliefs of the world around us?
Afterall, we all understand the language of a “slump”, or how we “stand tall”. We “bow our heads” and “shoulder up”.
Is this category of expression not one of the basic elements of the written emotional grammar?
“We respond to gestures with an extreme alertness and, one might almost say, in accordance with an elaborate and secret code that is written nowhere, known by none, and understood by all.”
This above quote is from E. Sapir, the cultural scholar, from the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. (The hypothesis being, in short, that language shapes our thought, so speakers of different languages will have different thought proceses).
While the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has long been proven an elaborate overstatement, it’s still interesting to think about how language and thought might be related. (As a side-note: Psychology of Linguistics might learn a thing or two from Cultural Studies).
Which brings me back to Creation and Reality.
So which is it? Creation of Reality or Reality of Creation?
