Giving thanks to breath

I’ve been thinking a lot about breath recently. How it is one of the essential and automatic functions of living organisms, utterly crucial yet rarely noticed. Of course, we DO notice it when our breath becomes impaired! The air quality has been bad in my PNW valley home, and truly life threatening in California as the terrible forest fires rage. As someone with asthma I have had my fair share of scary moments struggling to breathe; perhaps the gift of those experiences is not taking it for granted–breath is life. In Kundalini yoga I was taught that each person has a finite number of breaths in their lifetime and that when breathing in a certain manner, the “breath of fire” (agni pran), it counts as only one breath for the duration and thus extends life. The  practice of conscious breathing (pranayama) is foundational to yoga, it is one of the 8 Limbs of yoga philosophy. In yoga, one learns to attend to the breath, to honor and observe the breath, the opposite of taking it for granted.