Cloud Hands Meditation

"Breathe deep through your feet and hold – 
slowly float one hand upstream, palm up,
pull the breath down the outstretched  arm 
into the shoulders, release the breath  
as the other hand floats downstream."

From The Toddler continued here.

Dear Sara, my sweet dead Sister, & Dear Peter, my musical brother, eight months dead,

It was a cold morning in the video clip above, captured with a GoPro camera attached to my chest. But it was bright! Blindingly bright on the last morning of the year following weeks of overcast skies. I love that my exhaled breath is visible in the cold morning air.

I’ve been developing Cloud Hands Meditation for several years because it allows one to begin practicing tai chi immediately with no forms to learn. I feel the breath and the hands lead the body through the 24 tai chi forms. I learned exercises using the breath from Karen in her yoga classes.

For example, we would inhale for five counts, hold our breath for three, and exhale for seven counts. This simple exercise is included in a Washington Post article, “How to calm your mind with breathing, according to science,” published January 2, 2025, along with some interesting stories of science.

“With every inhale, the pupils in our eyes tend to dilate, our reaction time quickens and our ability to remember and recall information becomes more efficient. At the same time, our response to emotional information heightens, and we are also less likely to make a voluntary movement.

And when we exhale, the opposite happens.”

Breathwork involves the intentional control of our breathing using our higher cortical brain areas to override our unconscious breathing pattern in the brain stem, I learned from the article. Jack Feldman, chair of the neuroscience department at the University of California at Los Angeles, found the neurons responsible for generating breathing in the brain stem and named it the preBötzinger complex. Who knew?

While we sleep, our breath plays a role in the hippocampus, a key region for memory. And our breath joins “the neural activity in brain areas important for emotion and cognition, such as the prefrontal cortex and amygdala.”

We do this unconsciously when feeling stressed — we take a deep breath.

I love and respect stories of science. I am so impressed that Feldman, for example, followed an idea to look for the “neurons responsible for generating breathing in the brain stem” and gave it a name!

Of course, the Irish Twins know all this as members of the enlightened dead.

For our living readers, I encourage you to stand up and view the clip below on full screen and entertain a slow, meditated groove for the New Year. A final tip I heard years ago and is confirmed by the article, “breathe like a baby” — fill your belly with the breath.

Time to sign off for another month, Dear Sara and Peter, thinking of you both every day —

Heart rock found on the bank of the Nooksack River.

If you are new to this letter, follow this link for the background of our monthly Letters to Sara. If you enjoyed reading this one, please share it with a friend. Thanks ~w.