Everything Begins and Ends with the Breath
A little over twelve years ago, I began studying Tantra.
Tantra is a Sanskrit word that is often translated as to expand or to weave. Many Tantric texts teach that “Nothing exists that is not divine.” That includes the earth beneath our feet, the relationships that shape us, the joys and sorrows of being human, and even something as ordinary—and extraordinary—as the breath.
My journey with Tantra began after taking a class in New York City on the art of falling in love with yourself. One evening after class, I shared a cup of coffee with one of the facilitators. She asked what had inspired me to attend.
My answer was simple, but it carried the weight of a lifetime.
“I just know there is more to living than what I’m doing. I want more.”
At the time, I couldn’t have fully explained what I meant. I only knew there was a longing inside me. A yearning for something deeper than merely getting through the days. I wanted a life that felt more alive, more connected, more meaningful. I wanted to experience myself differently.
I had no idea that desire would eventually lead me to the breath.
Learning to Breathe
Not long after that conversation, I found myself sitting with my first Tantra teacher, pouring my heart out.
I was talking and crying at the same time, sharing pieces of myself that had been buried beneath years of responsibility, grief, fear, and longing. At some point he gently placed his hand on my knee and invited me to breathe.
I remember being startled.
Gasping for air with tears streaming down my face, I looked at him in confusion.
Then he said, “You’re holding your breath. Breathe.”
Until that moment, I hadn’t even realized I was doing it.
As I pulled air into my starving lungs, I felt something begin to soften. The tension that had been gripping my body loosened just a little. I took another breath. Then another.
As I listened to his guidance, I slowly allowed myself to receive the oxygen my body had been desperately asking for.
At the end of our session, he gave me homework.
“Remember to breathe.”
At the time, it felt almost absurd.
Of course I breathe. We all breathe.
Yet what he was inviting me into was something entirely different.
The Wisdom of the Breath
Obviously, we must breathe in order to stay alive.
What was radical for me was the idea that breath could become a conscious practice. That something I had been doing my entire life automatically could become a doorway into presence, healing, awareness, and even love.
More than a decade later, I still catch myself holding my breath.
I notice it when I’m worried. When I’m concentrating. When I’m trying to control an outcome. When life feels uncertain.
The breath has become one of the ways I return home to myself.
Again and again, it invites me back to the center.
As my practice deepened, I began to sit in meditation and ask questions. Sometimes those questions emerged from curiosity. Sometimes they arose from pain. Sometimes they came from a longing to understand myself more fully.
To my surprise, answers began to emerge.
Not as voices from outside myself, but as wisdom arising from somewhere deep within.
One day, during meditation, I asked:
“How can I learn to love myself more?”
This is what came.
A Letter from the Divine
Everything begins and ends with the breath.
Know that with each inhalation and exhalation, your relationship with your center deepens.
Be fully present in this moment. At its core, this moment is the only one guaranteed to you.
Each breath is an invitation into a deeper relationship with yourself, with life, and with the source from which all things emerge.
Over and over again, practice surrendering to the great individual and collective experiment of your soul’s evolution through the lens of your body.
Your body holds immense wisdom if you are willing to listen.
Listen deeply to the truth that all is one and one is all, while also honoring that you carry a uniquely individual expression of that truth.
Be yourself.
Everyone else is already taken.
Do not believe everything you think.
The mind is a wonderful servant but a poor master.
Remember to laugh.
Laughter is one of the great equalizers. It softens the hard edges of life and reminds us that even amidst challenge, joy remains available.
Love is the most powerful force in the universe.
Open your eyes and your heart to yourself, to others, and to all creatures who share this planet with you. Allow yourself to receive the love that is available in every moment, even when it arrives in unexpected forms.
Stand before the mirror often.
Promise yourself that you will meet whatever is reflected there with goodwill, compassion, and curiosity.
Release the ideas, identities, and patterns that no longer serve your becoming. Let them dissolve so that something new can emerge within the spaciousness they leave behind.
Do this knowing that love and its expression remain available to you always, in all ways.
Trust that there is always more unfolding than you can currently see.
Trust that life is often working on your behalf even when it feels confusing, painful, or incomplete.
When you learn to trust the universal consciousness that is love, you learn to trust yourself more deeply as well.
As your self-love deepens, ease begins to emerge.
Ease does not mean life becomes easy.
Ease creates balance.
Balance creates clarity.
Clarity creates precision.
And precision allows you to make choices that better serve your life, your purpose, and your heart.
Remember that you are a multifaceted being.
Within you live both feminine and masculine energies. Neither exists independently. Both are part of a greater whole that is reflected throughout nature, relationships, and the cosmos itself.
Commit yourself to the ongoing inner marriage between these energies.
As you become more integrated within yourself, your relationships with others become more conscious as well.
With each breath you take, you gain access to the wisdom already living within your body.
The breath helps you receive the waterfall of insight, intuition, and knowing that consciousness continually offers.
Trust that the practice of breathing consciously will transform you again and again throughout your life.
Be grateful for the current stage of your soul’s journey and for the body that allows you to experience it.
Trust that from your first breath to your last, your life is unfolding in ways far greater than your mind can comprehend.
Spend time in silence every day.
Listen carefully to what emerges.
And remember:
The world contains both beauty and pain.
Remain open enough to understand that both belong.
Both have something to teach you.
Both have shaped who you are becoming.
Love,
The Divine
Returning to the Breath
Twelve years later, I still return to these teachings.
Not because I have mastered them.
Quite the opposite.
I return because I keep forgetting.
I forget to breathe, to trust, to listen.
And then life gently reminds me yet again.
A deep breath. A quiet moment. A pause between one chapter and the next.
Everything begins and ends with the breath.
Perhaps that is why so many wisdom traditions place such importance on it. Breath is the first thing we do when we arrive here and the last thing we do before we leave.
Between those two breaths is a lifetime.
And every single breath in between is another opportunity to come home to ourselves.