Tag: Buddhism

BR#Eleven – Breath

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

Let me tell you a little about breath. Not just any breath either, the perfect breath. It turns out my shallow two second inhale followed by two second exhale may just be doing both my mind and body the type of harm you wouldn’t immediately imagine something that brings life would. In truth two seconds may even be a little generous. It is a long way from the recommended five point five second inhale and five point five second exhale, which conveniently equates to the perfect amount of breaths per minute. Five point five for those who don’t fancy the maths. This is according to James Nestor whose new book Breath delves into the art of something which we all seem to be doing wrong.

Nestor explains the science and art of breathing. He uses anecdotes and scientific research to back up and prove his theories. He discusses thousands of years worth of knowledge like ancient Indian pranayamic breathing techniques and the Buddhist Tummo. Tummo has in the last ten years been sexed up, repackaged and proven to the western world by Wim Hof. He goes into his own experiments with Stanford University of only nasal breathing and only mouth breathing, all of which are backed up by the research results which show a dramatic and scary contrasting end result. Our mouths have shrunk and our teeth don’t have enough space to grow straight anymore, three hundred years of industrial processed food haven’t helped. Heart disease, anxiety, depression, chronic fatigue, asthma – the list of diseases related to incorrect breathing seems endless. He doesn’t suggest breathing is going to cure a rampant disease of course but it can help with the preventative part, the bit western medicines ‘cut it out and cure it’ approach seems repeatedly limited in. It does turn out we’ve been breathing wrong all these years and he explains how and why.

What he shares is immediately relatable. This dissection of the consequences of a breathing I know I do and which I instinctively know and have known for a while to be wrong and dangerous. Nestor has managed to explain something which is hard to disagree with within our narrow prism of proved truth. We need things to be proven in certain ways that Eastern texts don’t do, Nestor manages to do this with language and information it is hard to disagree with. As I said I can relate to what he is saying though and I suspect that is probably what has led to this book being the success it has been. Good authors manage to give new information in a way that makes the author feel they’ve always known it and finally it has been confirmed. Genuinely, I want everyone, and especially everyone I care about to read this. Now then, it’s time to go practise my breathing.

Desire All

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

I’ve been fantasising again about running away and living a life of adventure. I should probably be clearer there, I daily fantasise about running away and living a life of adventure. It’s a tricky one coming from a life of seemingly constant travel to one in which I’m now in one place for three months shy of a year. It’s not that I’ve never stayed this long in one place. On two separate occasions I went a year, but they were in slightly more exotic places, Ibiza and Athens. There are times I wonder why I left either of them but I know why. It’ll probably also be why I leave here too. The problem though is that when I’m constantly on the move I start to find myself craving some stability and a home. It’s like I want the opposite extreme of whichever extreme I’m currently living. I share this not because I like to share, although I clearly do, but because I know I’m not alone in this kind of thing. We do this, we all do this. Maybe not to such extremes or perhaps a different type of extreme, but we all desire what we don’t have.

The question then is what hole are we trying to fill when we decide to fulfil our desires. I say this not just in the sense of running off and finding a boat to an exotic land, but I, we, buy things too. We desire and consume stuff, just lots of random stuff, and this must be for a reason other than because either we need it or we’re zombies who’ve been bitten by capitalism’s contagion. Sorry about the alliteration, I’m fallible. The point is though that there must be something we’re searching for other than the obvious; the adventure or the new t-shirt. Have they found a way of hacking into our inner selves and discovering that we have empty spaces which need filling. Or has life and the world we live in created these holes that we’re constantly trying to find answers for.

Desire is not a new thing. People in huts a thousand years ago desired something more so they sailed the seas and invaded countries. There may have been necessity and survival in a way very different to our own but there was still desire too. People have always craved jewels, there were wars fought over nutmeg, people killed for love. There is something natural about desire then, it’s about improving our own circumstances and making our lives better. It’s that drive that makes things better through ideas and inventions. Yet we are told by Eastern Philosophy to be objective and tame the desires within.

Ultimately these desires lead to suffering. I don’t doubt the Christian Bible will say something similar, as will the Koran. So is one right and the other wrong? Life is never so simple. We can use our desires to improve our worlds we live in, to help us strive, but if we can’t do anything about it then we will only suffer through our desire. If something is out of our control what is the point of allowing desire to take over. We must learn to be more objective, just be careful not to desire it, although it must be in our control so surely that’s fine. I was going to suggest it’s a crazy minefield with no answer but that all seems pretty simple and straightforward to me. Now then, that palm tree I was thinking about, I’m sure that’s something within my control…

Karma

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

Karma is a concept we’re all vaguely familiar with. I could be mistaken but it would probably not be a leap to imagine the general consensus being that if you do something good something good will happen to you and in turn doing bad will result is something bad happening back to you. That is a rather crude explanation but I imagine it more or less stands up. The next question would be whether the resulting return is the equivalent to the action, for example if you give a homeless man a sandwich will you get either a sandwich given to you later or the moral value of the sandwich in the form of something else? In truth I can’t answer that because I don’t know. It surely wouldn’t be too much of a push though to find holes in this idea of direct equivalence. In that case it must be more of a general thing, do some good and some good will happen to you.

There is one thing that I have always struggled with though and it is the idea that we can do good with the intention of receiving good in return. In George Orwell’s Burmese Days, U Po Kyin the corrupt magistrate and resident bad guy of the story, admits towards the end that before he dies he plans on building a series of Pagodas in honour of The Buddha and that with this act he will earn enough good karma points to receive a positive rebirth in the next life. This raises two issues, firstly that the Buddhist idea of karma revolves around the concept of rebirth unlike ours which is just that good shit will happen to you and secondly the rather perverse notion that you can buy good karma. I once asked some people at a pagoda when I was in Burma about being able to buy good karma and for them it seemed perfectly reasonable. The point here then returns to this idea of what the intentions behind the act are. For example if you buy one hundred meals for homeless children purely for the sake of the children this is an uncorrupted act. If you do the same but with an awareness that you’ll receive the equivalent in return this is not a positive act despite the positive outcome, the selfish intentions surely nullify any karmic points that you hoped to accrue. Does this mean that with the knowledge of and belief in the existence of karma your actions will forever be slightly tainted despite you best efforts? The knowledge and creation of karma renders a karmically pure act impossible? Fuck knows but surely just having loads of cash shouldn’t make it easier to avoid coming back as a frog.

If we insist on giving the receipt of positivity or negativity a name then so be it, but surely by merely being a good person and doing good things we find ourselves on a general level surrounded by good people and good actions. There will be extreme instances which go against the norm but it’s not hard to imagine. In a way it is the classic like attracts like argument and is easily just another way of describing a view of karma. Naturally the Buddhists would be able to look at this and say I’m not describing karma at all and clearly misunderstand it, in that case so be it. This then can be more about the idea that good people tend to be surrounded by other good people and bad with bad. It is probably worth mentioning that I also have issues with the concept of good and bad, and cringe at my own use of it. Maybe that could be for tomorrows piece though. In the meantime I’m going to go buy a sandwich and see who I can find, just in case.