The Triumph of the Exhale

Digital art collage by Stella Kalaw

My yoga teacher is a mistress of illustration. She can paint a picture with words of what she expects my body to do, and while my aging frame may not cooperate fully, my equally challenged-by-the-years brain does.

“Fix your gaze as if it were Brad Pitt at the end of your mat, in front of you,” says she.

“Snap!” say I.

I relay this by way of introduction to an idea that came to me quite suddenly—a totally original, never-learned-by-me-from-my-brilliant-yoga teacher idea. Gratitude is an exhale. You may already know this through your own experience, readings, yoga or meditation practice, but my considerably-aged self did not. It was a revelation.

For eight years since my first cancer surgery, I have practiced my own form of daily metaphoric rosary bead counting—one thank you, ten more wishes. Then another brief nod to personal good fortune, followed by ten more prayers to a god whose existence I believe in but who is so dreadfully overloaded these days. I cringe at increasing her/his/their burden.

I breathe in and out slowly but always have to wrench my monkey brain back to the task at hand. Thank you to be sure. But please, God, could you make certain this person will be OK, that the world will not fall even more to the bad guys, and that our children and their loved ones will stay safe and healthy? You know the drill.

Wonder of wonders, I discovered one morning that when I was counting my blessings on a slow exhale, I knew what real gratitude was. On a sigh I registered that we feel thankfulness most profoundly when we articulate it on an exhale.

Think of all that wishing, wanting, imploring breathlessness: that greedy, bursting feeling of entreaty, that often-hurried intake, even the cleansing yoga inhale of appreciation—that life is good, that the scenery is wonderful, that we are among the very lucky. And then—all that filling-up stops and morphs into a cleansing release of calm and possibility, however brief.

It seems in my limited knowledge of human biology that it is no accident that most of us leave this world on an exhale. A surrender of sorts to the mystery and majesty and magic of this world. In our final ceding of control, if at all possible, don’t we wish to leave with gratitude for a life where our blessings counted for more than the hurt and pain we have lived through?

There is an entire industry built around thankfulness. In this era in which our sad, mad, bad old world experiences so much despair and disenfranchisement we, its citizens, need apps to remind us to get in touch with our basic humanity.

Forgive this blanket condemnation, but I am learning to hate that frequently-used word “mindfulness.” It is too often the provenance of those with enough leisure time to indulge in a healthy pause. How does it play to those whose daily preoccupations may involve their survival at a foundational level?

Without struggling to be in the moment at all times, and alongside our innate human need to inhale with all our hopes and wishes, perhaps we can still move to places in our day of greater tranquillity and ease. Through that simplest and most difficult part of human engineering, we can send forth a long breath out of genuine praise for the ineffable, bittersweet beauty this life still holds.

Exhale.