[Editor’s note: the transcript has been edited for clarity. The music used in the audio is called “Music for Coherent Breathing by Sound Coherence and can be found here.]
Freya Secrest: Welcome! This is the Lorian Community Blog for March of 2024. We are offering an auditory blog this month with Ara Swanney and Freya Secrest, two of us who are part of the festival team. Coming up on March 17th is our Equinox festival and we wanted to share with you some of the way we work on developing these festival celebrations. We're going to start by sharing some music of coherent breathing and sound. Let yourself flow and let this be the invocation for our time together.
[Music 0:44-2:06]
Ara Swanney: That music goes with coherent breathing. There’s an equality of the in-breath and the out-breath of five counts that fits with the rhythm of Gaia and the sun. I first came across it recently when I attended a storytelling session and Retta, the woman telling the story, began with this breathing. It got me in the solar plexus and I just felt myself totally relax. I also thought it would be great to have this music in case I wake up in the middle of the night and can't go back to sleep. We wanted to share this experience with you, and there will be a link for it at the end of this blog.
Freya Secrest: I’d like to give a little bit more context for why we'd be drawn to this coherent breathing and how that fits in with our festivals. We see the solstices of summer and winter and the equinoxes of spring and fall as the breath of the earth. As we’ve been exploring this and looking at the rhythm of the seasons, we’ve come to see it as the rhythm of the Earth breathing in and out, and so this coherent breath really struck a chord with all of us.
We've connected each of these four seasonal festivals with different elements of the earth. Last solstice–summer in the Northern Hemisphere and winter in the Southern Hemisphere, we created a connection to earth and took pictures of our feet on the ground celebrating our links to our immediate points of on the planet. In the fall/spring equinox–fall in the north and spring in the south–we honored water and its life-giving refreshment and its qualities of flow. We're wanted that as a part of our celebrations in our festival time. And then as we came back around to the solstice of winter in the north and summer in the south, we highlighted fire and the warmth of heart and hearth. And now this spring/fall equinox celebration is completing the cycle and we're recognizing the element of air and the way it supports communication and connection.
In each of these festivals, we've brought in story and song as a way of sharing how the qualities of these elements enrich and expand our relationship with the planet in each season. That's what we will be doing again, but we think the element of air has been one of the least talked about–at least in my experience. It's been a bit of an exploration to deepen into what it means and what is air in relationship to the festivals of Earth. As we said, it's a medium of communication and connection. But like a fish in water, we don't see the medium in which we are moving and having our life–it’s unseen but so very vital. So this festival we want to draw attention to and highlight our connection through air.
Ara Swanney: As far as air is concerned (or any of the elements), I always like to check in and see how it's viewed by the Maori, the indigenous people of Aotearoa or New Zealand. To the Maori, air is a taonga or a treasure. And it is viewed as one that's derived from Ranginui, the sky father, and Maori legend tells that following the separation of Ranginui, and Papatūānuku, the Earth Mother, their child Tāwhirimātea fled with Ranginui to his new home in the sky, and from there Tāwhirimātea controls the wind and the elements. I live in Wellington, New Zealand, and it's known as a windy city. We always celebrate that– we have Tāwhirimātea on our side and it keeps our air clean, we don't have to worry about pollution. I do feel concerned about that because we talk about the pollution of the land and waters, but in areas like where I am, we don't really consider it the same way and I think that's an important thing. And the thing about Tāwhirimātea makes me feel connected to the wind; It’s an entity that I can be part of.
Freya Secrest: You bring a picture to my mind, I can feel myself in times when it's been very, very windy. I'm living right now close to Chicago, which is also called the Windy City, so that’s really fun to hear. [Freya and Ara laugh] I have been in the downtown area where it's so windy, I honestly did have to hold onto a pole not to get blown over. Some of that is structure of the buildings and how the streets and such channel the air, but it’s also that Chicago is right on Lake Michigan, which is a huge lake. Because you can’t see the other side, it's hard to differentiate it from the ocean, and the wind there is potent. As you were talking about the wind and the elements, I could feel my body remembering leaning against the wind; it's supporting. It's quite magical when I stop and begin to think of air as an ally, as something I can connect to as a partner. I think of the role that it plays on earth and it moves from powerful and strong–like getting blown over, to a gentle breeze that comes along and touches my cheek–it’s a little whisper, which is a different kind of friendship, isn't it?
Ara Swanney: Yes. And it can be cooling on a hot day. We've had some very hot days and it's lovely having a breeze come along and cool us.
Freya Secrest: That’s one of the things that I enjoy about the festival work–it brings my attention to the earth; not only the the rhythms of it and the seasons, but now this year in particular with the elements looking at the forms and how much each element adds to my experience. It's really quite touching to realize how neglected air has been. [laughs] We breathe it in, we breathe it out, there's not much thought about it. Part of what our festival work does for me is it brings a little more consciousness back to our relations, which is from the Native traditions here in the U.S.–to be aware of all our relations.
[To Ara]: How does air speak to you? You had the story, the bit of the myth of…I can't pronounce the names like you do–they wonderfully roll off your tongue. But where does that touch and live in you in your life?
Ara Swanney: Well, when I walk out the door and breathe in the air, I don't think about it consciously. But when I go outside, I breathe in the air, I look at the trees, air is part of it. There have been times when air has been very scary, like in a storm when a window was blown out by a strong wind. And other times when I just really love the softness of the air on a quiet summer's evening. The air quality does come to mind, but I'm not totally conscious of it. Talking about it, I realize it’s a really a big thing. Being on the ferry going between the North and South Islands, and being out on the deck and feeling the salty air out there…all the different qualities that you can have…or up in the mountains where it’s icy.
Freya Secrest: One of the phrases we used when we were talking about our planning for this festival was a “healing breath” or the sense of the rhythm of the earth and having that be healing. That's when I think you brought up the coherent breathing as a way to tap into some of our capacity to bring a healing energy.
Ara Swanney: Yeah, and to be healed. Because that was my immediate thought when I started that breathing. The feeling in my body of the breathing and that rhythm supported by the music rather than counting in my head, the five seconds in and five seconds out–the balance of it and going into that rhythm in my body made a huge difference. And it was the breath. Over the years, many of us have used the breath for different healing things like Rebirthing, or Holotropic breathing–all those different modalities.
Freya Secrest: When we chose the elements, when we started putting them together with a festival, I didn't have any particular planning of which one went with which, but with just what you've said with regard to air and the balance, to have it end up here at the equinox seems a very appropriate partnering between the energies of air and the energies happening with the planet right now with the the equinox–the equal day and equal night, and your sharing that this breathing is sort of equal in-breath and equal out. Funny how those synchronicities seem to work! [laughs]
Ara Swanney: It happens all the time! [laughs]
Freya Secrest: We haven’t really focused our festival work specifically around healing up to now; it’s really been celebratory. It's celebrating the Earth, it’s celebrating Gaia and its rhythms. I'm touched that in this festival the element of healing comes out. With fire, there's that sense of clearing and cleansing. Breath after all that cleansing of fire and light and the warmth of winter and summer, and the cold, clarity of winter…having the healing breath of that rhythm and balance with air is, as you say, very restful and calming. The Earth is doing a really intense piece of work coming down into seed, doing that all that preparation deep in the earth, sending down roots really moving into identity and its beingness in order to come out in the spring. And then in summer, that full flowering, that outreach of energy and life. The balance here of of spring and the equinox…a moment of balancing…I don’t have a lot of other words for it.
Ara Swanney: We have the seeds being blown in the autumn or the fall to be ready for the spring. I love the way we talk about it from both sides of the earth and just hold the wholeness of it all; It’s all happening at once.
Freya Secrest: It is, isn't it? Yes, it's thinking in spheres, rather than in lines. Thinking in a rhythmical, spherical way is very much what makes a Gaian orientation to festival. Some of that's been our own changing thought process, from point and line to spherical to rounded, which is what our earth is.
Ara Swanney: Wholeness.
Freya Secrest: Yes. It’s one of the gifts of our exploration, of what we're sharing. I think it's a healing relationship not just for ourselves, but also for the earth. That's what the festivals are for me. They're celebration, and I love the idea that healing comes out of celebration as much or more than it does fixing.
Ara Swanney: It goes beyond boundaries.
Freya Secrest: Yes. Well, I thank you, my friend, for this little bit of exploration. It's been fun to to try and put more frame and focus into what we're working with in our festival times. We invite any of you hearing this to come and join us on March 17. Our festival time is at 1pm Pacific. You just need to write into Lorian if you're not part of our Commons where the link goes out automatically. If you’d like to participate, please write me, Freya, at freyas@lorian.org
We will end this blog with another minute of Music for Coherent Breathing by Sound Coherence.