Photo by Hey Paul Studios

By Liz Chang

I pay most attention to my breath when it is thrown off its normal pace. I become aware of my breath when I pant to push myself a bit further at the gym, when I hold it as I walk quickly through a smelly sidewalk in the city, when it becomes shallow in an anxiety-provoking moment, and when I take in a deep breath to sigh or yawn. Breathing brings me into the present moment and is a mirror for understanding my mood and mindset.

I take it for granted most of the time because it is usually in the background, unnoticed and unprovoking. The time I was made most aware of my breathing was when I was a sophomore in college going to the emergency room for a chest x-ray that revealed I had a spontaneous pneumothorax. My lung collapsed. After several days of waiting for the lung to inflate and heal, I had to have surgery. From my understanding, the surgeon went in, sealed up the open air sacs in the lining of my lung, and put a chemical adhesive for the lung to stick to the chest wall so that it could remain in place. I was very aware of my breathing for the weeks that followed.

In my professional work as a family therapist, breath is probably one of the handful of things that I pay most attention to when I sit with clients. The pace of my breath and the depth of my breath reveals my emotions in the interaction, and it reveals my perception of the conversation at hand. The pace of the client’s breathing and speech gives me cues into the emotions at play, and can be explored to increase one’s self-awareness and self-regulation of emotion sensations in the body.

When I think about breath in the context of faith, I think about God breathing the breath of life into our lungs. I think about God as the undercurrent of life and as the God I oftentimes take for granted, just as I take breath for granted. Usually, it takes a storm, a dreaded life experience, or spiritual dilemma of some kind to remind me that God is an essential part of my being; that oxygen and breath are an essential part of my living. That I need God to survive. Because on most days, I am not thinking about survival because I am too busy ignoring the areas of myself that is desperately in need of a God who is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, and the list goes on. Breath is essential to life, but often taken for granted. May God be with us, even when we take God for granted.

Liz Chang resides in Seattle, WA and works for Navos as a substance abuse prevention & intervention specialist at a local middle school, and as a child and family therapist. She graduated from Seattle Pacific University with a Masters of Science degree in Marriage and Family Therapy, and is working towards certification as a Chemical Dependency Professional.