When I was a child I would get so angry. I would declare that I was going to hold my breath until I died. Whomever I was angry with at the time would always respond with the same logic, “you can’t hold your breath until you die because you will go unconscious and your body will betray you and start breathing on it’s own”. A part of me is still holding my breath until I die. I believe we all are. Medical research calls these areas “dead space” and shows that the average person has about 150 ml of dead space in their lungs. These “dead spaces” are the areas of the lung where no oxygen exchange occurs, even though it is physically possible, literally where we are holding our breath. There are more dead spaces in the lungs where it isn’t physically possible those are the hallways of our breath. The dead spaces I am referring to are the closed doors off those hallways that we never choose to open. I have been learning to be so aware of my body that I can actually feel these spaces inside my lungs and invite them to release the dead air and resume a conversation with the wind. You can too, if you choose to.

The winds have names and they have distinct stories. When I talk about the wind many people seem to return their attention to feeling a wind on their skin. Rarely does anyone bring their attention to the feeling of the wind of their own breath inside their bodies. From the easy to feel brush of wind on the inside surface of the nose to the barely perceptible breath in the alveoli of the lungs. We carry the wind within us all the time, and the water droplets held in our breath contain vast amounts of information. Our personal conversations with the winds are unique and deserve to be celebrated.

I am bringing my voice to the places inside me that have been silenced for years.