(written with Lesley Dean)

Soreness, tenderness, tightness
Restricting the expansion of ribcage
Preventing the full, deep inhalation

Feeling neglected without the teacher (Itamar)
The untutored student
Abandoned, alone, on her own
At fault for not being able to breathe properly
Blaming herself
“Flushing money down the drain”
“Breathworks workshop a waste of time”
“I’m too clenched”

In the anguish, she begins pulling herself:
twisting, stretching,
manual manipulation of the mortal coil,
through which breathing begins to expand.
Sea-change

Without conscious thought or volition,
a long, slow, deep exhalation
a deflating balloon
Accordion bellows kick into high gear

A force field of electric, vibrating prana billows outwards
Leonardo De Vinci’s flying machine takes off
Van Gogh’s blue and gold sunflowers
under a sad, haunted sky

Blue and gold pulsating orb
transformed by a rolling wave of breath
into a blanket of blue diamonds

Golden sierpinski gasket
with that golden force, power is endless
inverted magical triangle

Wormlike tips of mimoids crawling
at the bottom of Tarkovsky’s gelatinous ocean

Vines, leaves, mud, creepy crawlies
lizards and gheckos
Chris is reluctant to look up at the sky

After her long exhale, Lesley finds it difficult to breathe in again,
but the bellows push through the lung clamp
Sighing and crying through the final half hour

Chris’s clenching is a mirror to Lesley’s more subtle clenching
she’s climbed a mountain,
reached a high plateau,
but she’s not going to leave others behind
She’s going to throw a rope

Her pinched nerve is a physical manifestation of clinging
Within her ocean of calm, there are still whirlpools of clinging
The rescuer is not a finished piece of work

Wanting to share her release with mother and father
Generational clenching
Fear played out in the 80s too

Chris flashes back to a festival in 2021
Where he dismissed two guys with him as unimpressive
But the moment Mandy hit, he saw their holiness
And compassion flooded his mind

Implicit in the comparison mindset
is a ranking tendency.
Implicit in the ranking tendency is clenching.

Bamboo dominoes in the cafe, afterwards,
Reflected in the stainless knife,
warping and bending,
dripping and melting
rolling and tripping

The coffee cup is flowing into every other object
The coffee cup is flowing into the table
like trickling oobleck

Chris asks Lesley to tell her about her breathworks experience.
“We must capture it”, he says
Lesley replies: “so you want to bottle it?”
“We need to pour the experience onto paper.”
Lesley: “pour it where? It’s already everywhere.”