(As given by Hazrat Inayat Khan)
“The breath is what connects us with God, and the breath connects us also with manifestation.”
As the books, precepts, and doctrines of his religion are important to the follower of a religion, so the study of the breath is important to the mystic. We ordinarily think of the breath as that little air that we feel coming and going through our nostrils; but we do not think of it as that vast current (Spirit) that goes through everything, that current which comes from the Consciousness and goes as far as the external being, the physical world. In the Bible it is written that first the word was, and from the word all things came. And before the word was the breath, which made the word. We see that a word can make us happy, a word can make us sorry. There is a story told that once a Sufi was healing a child that was ill. He was repeating a few words, and then gave the child to the parents saying, “Now he will be well.” Someone who was antagonistic to this said to him, “How can it be possible that be a few words spoken anyone can be healed?” From a mild Sufi an angry answer is never expected, but this time he turned to the man and said, “You understand nothing about it. You are a fool.” The man was very much offended. His face was red. He was hot. The Sufi said, “When a word has the power to make you hot and angry, why should not a word have the power to heal?”
Behind the word is the much greater power, the breath. If a person wishes to study the self, to know the self, what is important is not the study of the mind, of the thought, the imagination, nor of the body, but the study of the breath. The breath has made the mind and the body for its expression. It has made all – from the vibration to the physical atom, from the finest to the grossest. The breath, the change of the breath can make us sad in the midst of happiness, it can make us joyful in the saddest, most miserable surroundings. That is why, without reason, in some places we feel glad, in other places a melancholy comes over us. It is the air that makes us so. You may say, “How can the breath make all this? How could it make the body?” I have seen people become in the course of years as their breath is. What exists in the breath is expressed in the form. As the breath is, so the child becomes.
One who does not breathe fully, in other words freely and deeply, can neither be well physically nor make use of his mental faculties. Very often one finds most learned and intelligent people unable to work as they wish and incapable of finishing a work which they have taken up. Sometimes a person thinks it a bodily weakness or mental weakness or lack of enthusiasm or loss of memory, not knowing that it is very often a matter of regularizing the breath. Most often people think that it is the external senses being tired or exhausted that prevents their thinking, but in reality it is the absence of right breathing, for right breathing can make the mental faculties clearer and the outer organs of the senses more capable of perceiving.
This shows that the mind can live a fuller life by what I call full breath. For a Sufi, therefore, breath is a key to concentration. The Sufi, so to speak, covers his thought under the breath. This expression of Rumi’s I would interpret that the Sufi lays his beloved ideal in the swing of the breath. I remember my Murshid’s saying that every breath which is inhaled with the consciousness of the Divine Beloved is the only gain, and every breath inhaled without this consciousness is the only loss there is.