Breath

The theme of this issue is ‘breath’, and the various angles we’ve been exploring on this theme have revealed so much of its symbolic potency.

A friend of mine who is a brilliant astrologer always says, “things in astrology mean what they mean because of what they are.” And I find this to be helpful framing for all symbolic exploration. It’s not about memorizing a laundry list of associations and labels. It’s about connecting to the nature of a thing with openness and curiosity, seeing all of its qualities and characteristics, and reflecting on how those qualities might show up across various contexts.

If we look at ‘breath’ through this lens, one of the characteristics we can reflect upon is its cyclical nature. It’s not a thing, it’s a process. In, out, in, out… breathing is not one side or the other, it’s the rhythmic dance of both, like the ebb and flow of the ocean waves.

With that in mind, enjoy this visualization of the planet ‘breathing’ as seen from space. Planet Earth does not have lungs and a windpipe like humans do, but the seasonal cycles of vegetation expanding and receding across the globe produce a co-cycle of the build-up and absorption of CO₂. A timelapse representation of these cycles puts an annual, global process into a form where we can clearly see the connection between our own inhales and exhales and the cycle of respiration occurring all around us, all the time, on an atmospheric level. As you watch this visualization, consider how your connection to the world around you might shift if you were to remember that, at least on some level, it is a living, breathing being all its own.

Watching the Earth Breathe

(Please note that we are discovering some of this material along with you, and not everything mentioned has been fully vetted for sensitive topics, language, or imagery. We advise that you explore these suggestions with your own emotional and energetic boundaries in tact.)

Samuel Beckett — Breath (play)
The script for this very short play is extremely strict but also leaves a ton of room for interpretation (see it here). I’ve never been to school for theater, but I have to imagine that Breath makes for a fascinating exercise. A quick search on YouTube will deliver an array of interpretations, but I encourage you to envision your own based on the text before looking at anyone else’s :)

Walt Whitman — Song of Myself (poem)
Leaves of Grass is one of the many classics that I haven’t read in full. I did gift a beautiful green leatherbound copy to my dad for his birthday once, though! And I’ve always found Whitman’s work to be very soothing and grounding for me. One of the poems in this collection, ‘Song of Myself’, came up in my research for this issue and as I read it, I was struck by the way just settling into it changed my breathing — like the poem itself was lulling me into a slower, steadier space.

It’s a long one and not all of the language lands for me on first read, but that’s all sort of part of it, I think. I recommend this for a time when you’ve got an hour to yourself… leave your phone in the other room, let go of the need for it to immediately make sense, and just let the lines that land for you emerge as you read. I can almost guarantee a deeper breath by the time you’re finished. (link here)

Marina Abramović — Breathing In/Breathing Out
If you’ve never been down a Marina Abramović rabbit hole, there’s no time like the present and this particular work is obviously very on theme for this issue. From Wikipedia: “Breathing In, Breathing Out is a performance piece by Marina Abramović and Ulay. It was performed twice, in Belgrade (1977) and Amsterdam (1978). For this performance the two artists blocked their nostrils with cigarette filters and pressed their mouths together, so that one could not inhale anything else but the exhalation of the other.” (clip here)

Movies

Any movie set in outer space brings the act of breathing oxygen into focus, but nothing does it quite like 2001: A Space Odyssey

The Big Blue and The Deepest Breath
Two films, one fictional and the other documentary, about the thrilling and dangerous sport of freediving.

Books

Sam Kean — Caesar’s Last Breath: Decoding the Secrets of the Air Around Us

“In Caesar’s Last Breath, New York Times bestselling author Sam Kean takes us on a journey through the periodic table, around the globe, and across time to tell the story of the air we breathe, which, it turns out, is also the story of earth and our existence on it. With every breath, you literally inhale the history of the world.”

James Nestor — Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art
“There is nothing more essential to our health and well-being than breathing: take air in, let it out, repeat twenty-five thousand times a day. Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences. Journalist James Nestor travels the world to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. The answers aren’t found in pulmonology labs, as we might expect, but in the muddy digs of ancient burial sites, secret Soviet facilities, New Jersey choir schools, and the smoggy streets of São Paulo.”

Paul Kalanithi — When Breath Becomes Air
“This inspiring, exquisitely observed memoir finds hope and beauty in the face of insurmountable odds as an idealistic young neurosurgeon attempts to answer the question, What makes a life worth living?”

The Life of Breath in Literature, Culture and Medicine
“This open access book studies breath and breathing in literature and culture and provides crucial insights into the history of medicine, health and the emotions, the foundations of beliefs concerning body, spirit and world, the connections between breath and creativity and the phenomenology of breath and breathlessness. Contributions span the classical, medieval, early modern, Romantic, Victorian, modern and contemporary periods, drawing on medical writings, philosophy, theology and the visual arts as well as on literary, historical and cultural studies.”

The Practice:

1. Find a comfortable seat with your spine straight and shoulders relaxed.

2. Close your eyes and take a few natural breaths to settle in.

3. Block your ears by gently pressing the small cartilage (tragus) between your cheek and ear with your thumbs (do not push inside the ear).

4. Rest your fingers lightly across your face: index fingers just above your eyebrows, middle fingers on the eyes, and ring/pinky fingers resting near the nose/mouth.

5. Inhale slowly and deeply through your nostrils.

6. Exhale while keeping your mouth closed, making a smooth, continuous, and steady humming “M-m-m-m” sound.

7. Feel the vibration in your head, throat, and chest for the duration of the exhale.

8. Repeat for 5 to 10 rounds.

Benefits:

• Nervous System Reset: Steadies the heart rate by promoting a high vagal tone. This shifts the body from sympathetic (fight-or-flight) to parasympathetic (rest-and-digest) dominance.

• Pain Relief: The soothing vibrations in the skull can help alleviate tension headaches and migraines.

• Enhanced Circulation: Humming naturally stimulates the release of nitric oxide in the nasal passages, improving blood flow and oxygenation.

We make our way into the pose as she cues the placement of feet and hands, the angles of knees, hips, and shoulders. Piece by piece, checking all our measurements as we go, we build the architecture of the pose.

Then, she reminds us of something that goes way beyond the yoga mat: intelligent structure supports freedom and expansion. When the body is well supported, muscle and mind don’t need to grip so hard to hold everything together. Boundaries carve out a big, open space and, without even trying, the lungs inflate to fill it.

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This “if you build it, the breath will come” approach was a revelation for me. In many yoga classes, you’re being instructed to deepen or expand your breath intentionally. There’s a time and a place for that, too, but for me it just produced more anxiety. I was trying to effort my way into a deeper breath while the structure of my body was not actually conducive to it, and it felt like I was fighting with myself from the inside.

Shifting into this way of allowing rather than forcing my breath gave me access to a whole new dimension in my yoga practice. Rather than trying to tell my body to breathe and then being frustrated when it didn’t obey, I started setting the conditions for my breath to move freely and was delighted by the way it seemed to work like magic every time.

It took my practice to a whole new level because, as any yoga teacher worth their salt will tell you, the real magic of a yoga pose is in the breath; that’s what brings it to life. So finding a new, more fruitful way of connecting with my breath changed everything.

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This perspective shift is so valuable and applies to so many other situations beyond yoga. Because the real magic of a situation — the special something that makes it feel real and alive — can’t be forced or planned. It needs to be supported, honored, and allowed. We do not get to control the breath of life. We get to serve it, dance with it, enjoy it… but we do not get to tell it what to do or when to show up.

Now, that doesn’t mean we get to sit idly by just waiting for something to happen, either. We’ve got a job to do. We do all the grunt work: establishing and maintaining structures, showing up consistently, arranging things in the way that the magic tends to enjoy. We learn what she likes, light candles in her honor, and scatter rose petals along the path and then she decides whether or not she’s going to bless us with her presence. This is not a game you exploit, it’s an invitation you extend.

This is how I’ve found it works with a personal sense of meaning in life, too. You can’t manufacture a meaningful moment. All you can do is create the conditions for it to emerge, and it either happens or it doesn’t.

It’s also how I’ve found it works with creating a culture on a team. It’s not fully something that can be enforced. If you want to encourage a specific kind of culture within a group, you can create structures that support and encourage that culture but at the end of the day it’s really up to the people on the team as to what culture they’re going to actualize. This is why the leader is so important — they set a tone, set the stage, tee things up, so that a particular kind of magic is more likely to emerge. But always “more likely”; never guaranteed.

Every artist will recognize this pattern in their process, and artists are perhaps the ones among us who have developed the most constructive relationship with it. I’m reminded of the Picasso quote, “Inspiration exists but it has to find you working.” Artists engage a certain kind of discipline and routine around their work and show up to the studio every day, but they never really know whether or not that magical spark will happen. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. They trust that if they engage with the work faithfully, the spark will come regularly enough that they can create something substantial. But at the end of the day, it’s not really up to them.

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Modern humans tend not to do very well with the idea that we’re not in control, and I’m as much of a control freak as the next person (maybe even more). But I have to say… I really like this service and surrender thing.

As I become more practiced with it, I discover time and time again not only how much more effective it is but how good it feels. I like following my breath… taking cues from it, letting it tell me what it likes and what it doesn’t and then doing its bidding. I like taking responsibility for the simple duty of setting the stage and letting the rest go. My ego loves the idea that I’m somehow responsible for the magic, but it’s a lot of pressure and the truth is… it never really feels honest.

These days, I’m finding it better to admit to my limitations and let the magic rise on its own. It does mean letting go of some control, but it also opens up the possibility of being pleasantly surprised. And isn’t that always the best part?

“What’s going to happen?”

“I don’t know… let’s see :)”

Note: the yoga teachers I’m referencing here are practitioners of Katonah Yoga, and you can find out more about it here.

This isn’t unique to me, of course — it’s the human condition. We all have to find our way of accepting that no one, no matter how much they love you or how hard they try, will ever be able to fully know you the way you know yourself.

Bittersweet.

I was raised by a mother who really insisted on expressing your feelings and talking things out. Looking back now, it was a pioneering standard of open communication, but at the time I made the mistake of assuming that there was a promise implied: if you can articulate your experience accurately, if you can find the right words, then you will be understood. Seen. Witnessed.

Like you spend all your time feeling like a live wire, full of energy and potential with nowhere to go. But if you can express yourself faithfully… ahh the relief of connection. The wholeness, the stability, the hum of all that electricity finally flowing through a closed circuit.

Turns out it doesn’t quite work that way, and that discovery remains one of the great heartbreaks of my life so far.

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Life is full of these excruciating, gaping chasms that are impossible to cross.

Between each of our inner worlds and the rest of the world outside…

Between our human consciousness and the unified source consciousness that we sense within and throughout all of existence…

Between everything that’s existing in this time and place, all that came before it, and all that will come after...

Everything that we are is dwarfed by the magnitude of everything else. We are inherently limited, trapped in this place and time, and we’re teased by the possibility of transcending that limitation.

Even though our rational minds know that these chasms are ultimately, at least on some level, insurmountable, there is a foolish part of us that always wants to try. If we’re lucky, that inner fool never dies. If we’re wise, we give it something to create.

The act of creation is one of the primary ways we attempt to bridge these distances. Whether it’s a painting or a business or a baby, we create in hopes that we might achieve the impossible feat of connecting worlds, realities, timelines, and truths.

Creation is our way of leaving our mark — letting others know that we were here. It may even be how we solidify our own sense that we were here… That it wasn’t a hallucination or a dream — we did, in fact, exist.

Because until we’re witnessed by another, until we take what’s happening inside of us and find some way for it to materialize on the outside, everything that we are and everything we experience can take on this suspicious, shapeshifting quality. Making something out if it is our way of pinning it down, insisting that it happened, and it mattered. “I’m not crazy, right? You see it, too?”

But the artistic endeavor has its own impossible chasm to cross. It seeks to take the real, the ephemeral, the emergent thing itself and somehow translate it into something representational, concrete, and crafted.

And when art needs to bridge this divide, it reaches for one of the oldest bridges we have: breath.

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Breathing is life’s way of connecting all sorts of things that are fundamentally separate.

We call the process that every living thing uses to take in nutrients and turn them into energy “cellular respiration”, and there are volumes of research exploring the various types of information our bodies receive about our environment from simply taking in the air around us.

Your breathing is also a bridge between your conscious mind and your autonomic nervous system, allowing you to induce or encourage certain nervous system states just by manipulating your inhale and exhale.

Humans throughout history have also used breath, whether in practice or in metaphor, as a way of connecting with the eternal or the divine, a motif that’s repeated over and over again in art and ritual.

Breath is such a common theme in love songs that it borders on cliché, but we can’t help it — intermingling your breath with someone else’s is in some ways as intimate as it gets, and one of the tried-and-true ways we can approximate an articulation of what it feels like to connect with another person on the deepest level.

The breath and the creative instinct spring from the same well, and we look to them both when we need a sign of life.

If we’re in the unfortunate position of needing to assess whether someone or something is alive, the first question we ask is “are they breathing?”.

When looking for indicators of intelligent life or advanced civilization, one of the main things we look for is artistic representation.

And if we want to say that a particular artistic representation has a lot of life to it — that it’s successfully crossing the chasm — one way to give a stamp of approval is to say that it feels like “living and breathing”.

We look for breath as a sign of life, same as we leave our art behind as a sign that we lived.

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Over 60,000 years ago, our early ancestors chewed on ochre and charcoal, mashing them into a pigment. They then held up their hands against a cave wall, and blew the pigment through hollowed out bones and reeds, leaving behind an impression of their hand like a stencil.

This blowing technique was used to depict not only hands but animals and symbols as well, and it’s what created the earliest known cave paintings.

Think about that for a moment. Our first artistic expressions were literally, mechanically, breathed into being.

There’s even DNA from saliva left behind in these paintings, and they represent the bridging of another impossible divide: between the founding generations of humans — hunter-gatherers surviving against the odds and curiously allocating time and resources for artistic expression — and us, with our air conditioning and smartphones and Uber Eats. Two realities that are worlds apart, miraculously connected by art and breath.

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These cave paintings remind me of so many school desks, bathroom stalls, and bus seats inscribed with the same basic message over and over again:

“Natalie was here”

“Brian wuz here”

“Hannah + Jeff, 1996”

That scene in Shawshank Redemption when an old man feels so alienated and alone in the world that he takes his own life, but only after making the effort to carve his existence into the rafters: “Brooks was here.” Our hearts break for him because we know the ache ourselves.

The art we make. The families we nurture. The businesses we build. Me, sitting here on my laptop, fumbling for the right words… All of us just trying to build something that helps us feel a little less isolated, a little less trapped, a little more infinite… one breath at a time.

There is profound insight to be gained from paying attention to something our bodies do automatically. We don’t ask our lungs to breathe or our hearts to beat; they simply do. What makes the breath unique, however, is that unlike most functions governed by the autonomic nervous system — including heartbeat, digestion, and pupillary response — it exists in both the conscious and unconscious realms. Breathing happens on its own, yet we can also intentionally control it. And through that control, we gain surprising influence over the systems connected to it.

Of all the things we can pay attention to in a yoga class, the breath is both the most basic and most pivotal aspect of one’s practice. Why has this invisible, automatic process remained central not only to yoga, but to healing traditions around the world for thousands of years?

Before we answer that, take a moment.

Simply notice your inhale.

Then your exhale.

At its most basic level, breathing is gas exchange: “fresh air” / oxygen in, “stale air” / carbon dioxide out. Oxygen makes its way throughout our body and fuels cells, a process that enhances energy absorption from our nutrition. Carbon dioxide, a byproduct of this process, returns to the lungs to be exhaled.

The breath has been our companion through every stage of human history. Long before we understood neurons, hormones, or the autonomic nervous system, our ancestors recognized that changing the breath changed the way we felt. Today, science is beginning to explain why. You may be familiar with the two branches of the autonomic nervous system: the sympathetic nervous system (”fight or flight”), which mobilizes us in response to stress, and the parasympathetic nervous system (”rest and digest”), which helps restore equilibrium. Intentional breathing techniques can act as a bridge between the two, helping us shift from a state of activation into one of greater calm, presence, and regulation.

One of the key players in the breath’s affect on the nervous system is the vagus nerve, the longest cranial nerve in the body. Beginning in the brainstem and traveling through the neck, chest, and abdomen, it helps regulate many involuntary functions, including heart rate, blood pressure, and digestion. The vagus nerve is a major component of the parasympathetic nervous system and serves as a communication highway between the brain and many of our vital organs.

Researchers often refer to “vagal tone” as a measure of vagal activity and resilience. Higher vagal tone is associated with a greater ability to recover from stress, while lower vagal tone can make it more difficult to return to equilibrium. Slow, controlled breathing—and even vocal vibrations such as humming, chanting, or singing — can stimulate the vagus nerve and support this restorative response.

In class, I often say, “We may not control our external circumstances, but we can control our breath.” That simple act can help shift us from reacting automatically to responding more intentionally.

Research also suggests that consistent breathwork and meditation practices can influence brain structure and function over time, particularly in regions associated with attention, emotional regulation, and self-awareness. Studies have also found links between intentional breathing practices and reductions in stress hormones, inflammatory markers, and perceived anxiety levels.

All of this is particularly relevant when viewed through the lens of what scientists call evolutionary mismatch theory — the idea that adaptations that once helped us survive can become less suited to rapidly changing environments.

Evolution takes time. Modern life does not.

For most of human history, stressors were immediate and short-lived. Today, our nervous systems are asked to process a constant stream of emails, notifications, deadlines, traffic, headlines, obligations, expectations, and comparisons. Our ancestors did not have to navigate social media, answer Slack messages at 9 p.m., or absorb the worries of the entire world before breakfast.

What a time to be alive.

I say that sometimes with sarcasm and frustration, but more often with genuine awe. Human beings have accomplished extraordinary things in a remarkably short period of time. Yet our biology is still catching up.

Perhaps that’s one reason our ancestors placed such importance on the breath. Pranayama in India. Qigong in China. Indigenous and ceremonial breathing practices found across cultures and continents. Long before neuroscience could explain the mechanisms, people understood that breath could influence how we think, feel, heal, and connect. Modern research is increasingly validating what many of these traditions have taught for centuries: that intentional breathing can be a powerful tool for supporting mental, emotional, and physical well-being.

In a world that changes faster than our biology can adapt, the breath remains what it has always been: a steady companion. A built-in resource. A way to return to ourselves amid uncertainty, overwhelm, and constant stimulation.

Thousands of years ago, the first yogis may not have been able to explain the vagus nerve or the autonomic nervous system. They didn’t need to. They understood through experience what many of us are rediscovering today: that something as simple as paying attention to the breath can change the way we move through the world.

So now, let’s return to yours.

Inhale slowly and gently through your nose for a count of three or four. Feel your lungs expand.

Pause briefly.

Exhale for the same length of time.

Pause again.

Repeat.

As the breath begins to settle, see if you can gradually lengthen your exhale until it becomes slightly longer than your inhale.

Repeat for ten rounds.

Then notice how you feel.

Practice daily.

Note: Simple paced-breathing exercises are generally safe for most healthy individuals. If you have a respiratory or cardiovascular condition, are pregnant, or have a history of panic attacks or anxiety-related breathing difficulties, consult a healthcare professional before attempting prolonged breath-holding or advanced breathwork practices.

Well…

This is not the first time in my life that a “one day” vision started looking at me like it was actually meant for “right now”. Other expressions of Breath&Roses are already under development and on their way to you, but I love that this ‘magazine’ turned out to be B&R’s first real step out into the world.

The vision for Breath&Roses is that it’s a home, a resource, and a beacon for all of us who believe in a future built on Love and are willing to do the work that’s necessary (internally and externally) to bring that to life. I’ve thought a lot about what exactly that work entails, and our 12 Principles are an attempt at a blueprint.

This magazine format will allow us to explore certain ideas, experiences, and concepts from different angles, because we need more than one dimensional mic drop moments. We don’t need to be told what to think, what to do, and what to be afraid of. We need philosophical spaces we can wander around in, where we can make our own discoveries. That’s the kind of space we are aiming to cultivate here.

We’ll be operating on a monthly(ish) cadence, although that could change as things unfold. Each issue will be focused around a theme with the goal of exploring that theme from a different angle in each segment. The themes of the first two issues are “Breath” and “Roses”, allowing us to explore the symbolism, associations, and energies that give meaning to our name.

We’re inspired by the idea of imagining a true digital-first magazine, and we’re grateful that a platform like Substack exists where we can launch, build, and adapt as we figure things out. Over time, we’re hoping to support deeper research, outside contributors, and a serious investment in the infinite, and infinitely exciting, multi-media possibilities.

An enormous thank you to my friend and partner, Danielle. I am not exaggerating when I say that Breath&Roses would still be stuck inside my head and my notebooks without her. One thing you learn when you try to create something is just how staggering a distance you have to cross going from idea to execution. I might’ve gone mad wandering the desert without you, Dani. You’ve been the most incredible editor, designer, CODER (B&R is building a digital product and Dani vibecoded a working prototype ::mind blown:: ). I am so honored and humbled by your belief, trust, patience, and truly impressive work. I love doing this with you.

With that, I think all that’s left to say is that I hope you enjoy Issue 1: Breath! If you do, we’d love it if you’d subscribe, share, and let us know your favorite parts. Thank you for being here from the beginning <3

Welcome to the Breath&Roses experience.

I was 27 when I really left home — not the faux independence of campus life or a tiny Manhattan apartment a half-hour from my parents on the LIE. The first true leaving was with my now-husband, Jason, when he landed a job in Philadelphia. Two hours on the Jersey Turnpike felt devastatingly far for a Queens-raised, first-born Italian-American daughter — one of only two people across three generations to ever truly leave home since my great-grandparents crossed the Atlantic.

We’d been in Philly a little over a year when my dad was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. He died six months later.

For some time following my dad’s passing in 2012, I would experience dreams so real, so vivid, I interpreted them as visitations. Not every dream my father appeared in felt like these, so that hopeful, mystical, part of me that believes in life’s mysteries took these particular dreams as a sign that somehow, through the veil between the material and the ethereal, my father and I got to experience meaningful time together again.

Jason and I moved several more times in the years after that, a cycle of starts and stops as our communities, environments, and comforts shifted around us. We finally landed in Richmond, Virginia, in 2019; the settling that I had been softly craving for nearly a decade was finally happening. What I didn’t expect, though, was the unprocessed grief to settle in as well. I couldn’t name it at first, this new heaviness that suddenly became a part of every moment, arriving at the very time when the life we had worked and sacrificed for was finally taking shape. In an attempt to rebuild the communities I kept leaving, and to hopefully shake the shadow of this yet-to-be-named feeling with something familiar, I sought out yoga studios and filled my free time with classes. Hot yoga, Ashtanga, Vinyasa, Yin — I’d sometimes stay for three classes in a row, getting in a good sweat or stretch but nothing coming close to the itch that needed scratching.

Then one night I stayed for my first breathwork class, and my heart broke wide open.

As a yoga teacher, I’m familiar with the breathing techniques, or pranayama, used in various yoga and meditation classes — slow, steady breaths often used to help settle our overactive nervous systems — and I expected this class to offer some version of that. Supportive, meditative, controlled, easeful.

The teacher began to explain what to expect: we would be lying on our backs and breathing in a particular pattern in and out through our mouths for about 40 minutes. She warned that the experience might induce intense sensations — body temperature fluctuations, heart rate shifts. I was a little skeptical and a lot curious, and I had zero expectations except that maybe I’d get a little nap in (I love naps). I got into position and began breathing according to her cues.

David Elliot is the humble healer who has trained many teachers in this particular technique, which reinforces the practitioner’s natural ability to use their breath to explore their emotional depth and subconscious blocks. Breathing shifts from the more common and calming nostril-breathing to a two-part, open mouth inhale and exhale. The energy stoked by this shift stimulates the hypothalamus, the part of the brain that controls many of the body’s hormones. This creates a higher vibration throughout the body that can evoke powerful, sometimes transcendent experiences. Emotional traumas and subconscious emotions unlock, allowing for a deep connection to Spirit and stimulate one’s natural capacity for healing.

My first few minutes in this practice were physically uncomfortable, as my lungs filled and emptied in ways that were both unfamiliar and unsatisfying. I wanted to stop and return to my natural breath, to take the biggest inhale through my nose, but we had also been warned about this desire so I pushed through. Then the mental cacophony started, as my active mind raced from thought to thought. Just as the thoughts were constant and colliding, though, something shifted. Space, time, earth, divine, body, spirit all blurred together into one reality. I wish I could recall in full detail what happened next, but all I can say is that I was with my dad, and I wasn’t dreaming.

Breath and spirit have shared translations since the very beginnings of language and civilization — ruach in Hebrew, pneuma in Greek, spiritus in Latin. Prana in Sanskrit is breath, but also life force, or vital energy, which is also true of the translation of qi (or chi) in Chinese philosophy. In the physical sense, these words all refer to the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide necessary for life. Their shared dual meaning, however, is an attempt to name that universal energy, that divine nature, that invisible yet palpable force that exists within us and around us, that weaves its Gossamer thread into every living thing and connects all of it to the universe itself.

The book Caesar’s Last Breath: Decoding the Secrets of the Air Around Us by Sam Kean shows how every exhale by any being that ever lived is still part of our atmosphere, making its way into our every inhalation. I find comfort in knowing that every breath I take contains some part of my father. It is said that we are all energy and that energy never ends, it just changes form. Breath and Spirit and Energy and Atmosphere. Universe and God and the Divine and the Cosmos. There is more to this world than what we experience with our senses. Every once in a while those extrasensory parts are revealed, like our breath becoming visible a cold day. From our very first inhale, we become part of a legacy of exhales 1.5 billion years old. Our final breath will continue on long after we are gone.

Gently, the instructor guided us out our session. There was that familiar reluctance one has when a good dream begins to fade, but there was also this sense that I was leaving some spirit realm. I tried to cling to that feeling as long as I could; I knew I couldn’t bring my dad back with me, but I just wanted to stay in his warmth a little longer.

I came to drenched in sweat, with both a weight and a lightness in my heart. My grief was like a bubble in my chest, so close to popping. I was also insatiably hungry. I left the class and walked into the first store I saw — a little shop called “For the Love of Chocolate,” full of fancy truffles and confectionery everything. Usually, the last thing I want when I am hungry like this is sweets, but something pulled me in. I am sure I looked wild — mascara running down my face, matted hair, sweaty clothes, and a dazed expression that melted into how I moved and spoke as I flatly said “no” to the person offering help finding something.

I walked, as if hypnotized, right to it. It seemed out of place. On top of a beautiful display of marzipan and chocolate-coated delicacies was a jar filled with jelly rings. The kind you get from the drugstore.

I bought ten, to the shock of the clerk, who tried to tell me that the raspberry squares in the case were clearly the better option. I devoured my jelly rings as I walked to my car and sobbed the whole way home. The bubble had finally burst. This secret grief had stayed hidden until I was finally in one place long enough to process it. It felt terrible and cathartic and sweet. It felt like every emotion you could name all at once. Most of all, though, it felt needed.

I went back to this breathwork class several times after that. I didn’t always have the same transcendent experience, but I always got jelly rings afterward. As I ate them, I felt connected to my dad again — not through visions or dreams, but through something quieter. Like breath itself: invisible, ordinary, and always there.