Breath and Emotion Are Identical

In this excerpt from the book Conductivity Healing, His Divine Presence Avatar Adi Da describes the “feeling-cycle of the breath”, and the role of breath in maintaining “responsibility for love in every moment”:

Feeling is either obstructed and reactive or unobstructed and non-reactive. Reactive emotions—such as fear, sorrow, and anger—are forms of recoil. They contract the mechanisms of the whole body, and obstruct or attenuate the “conductivity”, and (thus) the responsibility, of the whole being. When there is simple, direct, and native participation in the state of life, there is no reactivity, but a pleasurable, relational force and radiance. This is love, or unobstructed “conductivity”. In that case, the responsibility of the whole body-being is optimum, and Communion with the Real Condition (or Truth) of all conditions is possible, and even inherent in that instant.

The cycle of breathing is a reflection of the present state of “conductivity”, and (thus) responsibility, of the individual. Indeed, the cycle of breathing, or “conductivity” of life-energy, is senior to all “subjectivity”, all reactivity. Breath and emotion are identical. You feel and breathe simultaneously, as a single event. Unobstructed feeling, or love, is senior to the physiological action of the breath, but simultaneous with it. Love is “creative”, or “causative”, relative to breath and life.

Reactive feeling, or negative and “caused” emotions, are secondary to the physiological action of the breath. Shocks of life modify the breath-life pattern directly, and create contracted emotional patterns, as well as the sense that love and good feelings depend on reasons or circumstantial stimulation. Thus, by “experience” and reaction, your native responsibility for love in every moment is weakened. Shocks of life and breath are “creative”, or “causative”, relative to reactive (or obstructed) emotions.

The artful task of the living being is to remain responsible for its inherent disposition and “conductivity”, even through and in the midst of the shocks and impositions of “experience”. It is the Law of “self”-sacrifice, or love, that is hidden in every breath. If you abide as love, with free attention in all action, then you remain in the responsible position relative to life, breath, action, and the process of Realization. But if you abide in your “subjectivity”, ego-possessed, distracted (by the obsessive “sound” of thinking) from feeling in the infinite pattern of relations, then you are irresponsible, subject to random “experience”, unable to conduct life, or to breathe openly, or to act sanely and humanly, or to Realize Truth.

The feeling cycle of the breath is (thus) the center of life and all relations. The conscious feeling of the bodily and relational cycle of breath and life, under conditions of action and repose, is fundamental to well-being, good relations, and to the entire affair of “conscious exercise”. Therefore, it is essential to account for the critical factors and events in the feeling-cycle of breathing.