Breathing the Lord's Prayer
So, once I awakened to my own speaking slowing down (which it does when you inhale more regularly) I started listening to some other languages, the languages of the ancients. Listen to Hebrew. Or to Aramaic. The breath is so present in the language itself. You cannot miss it. I remember sitting in a synagogue when I was eight and hearing the rabbi chant in Hebrew.. baruch atah adonai...in Hebrew..eloheinu melech Ha-Olam. As the language brought me more deeply and intimately into my body and all that lived in that 8 year old body, I remember feeling uncomfortable. As a child I had asthma with some severity, having to receive oxygen a couple of times or more. The Hebrew language itself connected me to my body and to my breath. Or more accurately, it shed some light on my disconnection from it. Isn't that amazing? A spoken language did that. The English language makes it easy to speak on the exhale, with very, very few inhales. I listened to John O'Donohue speak Gaelic in one of his recordings. It's the same thing, you cannot speak that language without being connected to the breath, and slowing it way down. Language has much to teach us, not only in its varying meaning, but in how it is spoken. Some connect us to the breath more than others.
So, I invite you while you speak, as hard as it may be with this language we have been given, to slow down and breathe when you speak. That action, of slowing down, connects us more deeply to our breath, to the body and to the moment all at once. If you are a church-goer and find yourself saying the Lord's Prayer, try slowing down and breathing while you say it. We must slow down to receive one of the one of the best things in it, on earth as it is in heaven. We breath heaven into earth and it starts in our own earth, the earth of our bodies. Let's remember the inhale when we are speaking. I have a hunch it might not only slow us down but give us the opportunity to catch (or breathe) a glimpse of heaven on earth.
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