Breath/Death

When meditate, I sometimes imagine the rising and falling of my breath in the form of a sign wave, with the in and out moving a line up and down over time.

Going up the slope of the wave, I am breathing in; going down, I am exhaling.  This graphic representation of my breathing has often come in handy to keep my awareness focused on my breath.

After much practice with this meditation aid (or mantra), I have been able to contemplate the various parts of this living, breathing graph.  And the parts of the wave that have intrigued me most recently are the peaks and troughs.

The peak of a wave is when the lungs are full to capacity--in a sense, one is holding one's breath for a slight moment--I reach the zenith of the track and am still, lungs bursting with life-giving oxygen, before the  roller coaster plunges down the slope and my lungs involuntarily, with the help of gravity, begin to deflate. I exhale.

But when the cart of the breath reaches the nadir, things get much more interesting and perhaps a bit scary.  At the bottom, it seems that I am out of life-blooming oxygen, as if I had floated to the bottom of the ocean.  Again, I am still.  Of course, the lungs are not exactly empty--we normally breath in a very small range compared with our total lung capacity, as the following chart shows:

Source: U of Miami 

Surprisingly though, in a normal breath (the darker blue band in the middle) we only use about 500ml of air and leave approximately 1800-2200ml in our lungs, far from being completely out.  Voluntarily with a little effort, we can only force another 1000ml out, leaving almost a liter we'll never be able to get out.  In fact, our total lung capacity is almost 6000ml for men and about 4200ml for women.  So as you can see, we are full of a lot of hot air.

But tell all of that to a drowning man or a person suffocating in a fire.  When we have exhaled our last breath, we are out of usable oxygen, regardless of our lung capacity.  So too when meditating.  When the sine wave reaches the bottom, I can't really get any more oxygen out of that breath.  Only the availability of fresh air around me allows my involuntary respiration to draw me again back to the surface of life.

During meditation, I contemplate the symbolic significance of the bottom of the sine wave more than I do the scientific, literal measurement of the capacity of our lungs.

If the top of the wave is life, then the bottom is death. Both are connect and contained within the elegant symmetry of the sine wave.

When I exhale and reach the bottom of the trough, it is only wishful thinking that my cerebellum will kick in and automatically contract my diaphragm and draw more air into my lungs.  But in fact, I really don't know for certain if I will draw a next breath:  I could have a heart attack, a meteor could hit the earth, a tree limb could crash in on my head, or the kid dreaming our world could wake up.  I have no way of knowing.

Although this kind of reflection may sound morbid, it is a stark reminder to stay in the moment.  Because I never know if this breath may be my last, I try to pay attention to what is happening now and to make the most of my life as it is.  Because this breath could be my last, it reminds me of my inevitable fate and offers me the opportunity to practice accepting my destiny.