The Vertical Breath

I’m fascinated by the concept of the vertical breath. As I understand it right now, this concept flips what we traditionally think of regarding time.

We typicaly envision a horizontal line, with a dot in the middle. The dot is ‘now’ and everything to the left is the past. Everything to the right is the future.

The line of thinking is that the past happened, it has your own emptional imprint on it. The future is too uncertain, we can’t predict the next moment.

Too often, perhaps, we regret the past and have anxiety about the unknown of the future.

Here’s the flip. Because the past and future no longer exist, we carry all that into the present moment. When we breath in and out everything lives in the moment of that breath. The past, and it’s guilt, shame, highlights and the future, with all it’s unpredictability - it all lives in us now. In this breath.

There is no before or after this moment. This moment is what we are becoming.

We move from a mental model of a horizontal line, to a vertical one. So we can focus on the now. It’s all there really is.