Breathe In, Lift Off
Elements #3: Adventures in Levity and Gravity
Asked for his opinion on the value of the huge diversity of plants in the Cape fynbos region, a visiting Indian Ayurveda specialist a few years ago said "Vata!" Vata, for those new to Ayurveda, is all about wind and air (it exists alongside the two other Ayurvedic qualities - fiery pitta and earthy kapha). And this makes sense when you've been out in the Cape Town streets or up in the Table Mountain fynbos when the south easter is blowing. I was never so aware of a prevailing wind as I became when moving to the Cape, and realising my bicycle would be virtually lifted off the tarmac if the street I was attempting to ride down was facing the wrong way at the wrong time of a south easter day.
By contrast, much the highest mountains of South Africa are the Drakensberg in Kwa Zulu Natal, where the air is often muggy and still, though of course the wind still whistles at times. I first visited the Drakensberg at a time when the airwaves were full of the British general election of 1997. I found myself at a work conference at the Drakensberg Sun Hotel, and thus glued to the airwaves on screen for the night as the old and not lamented Tory certainties of my youth came crashing down. By day we were focused on policy matters and constitutional environmental issues and I was trapped in a hell of aircon with that fresh mountain air visible but not accessible.
But I could see them, these grand peaks on the edge of Lesotho, the Maluti mountains (although they only change language at the border, apparently). When you walk into them, they emerge in layers, sleeping dragons indeed. When the water comes in summer torrents it pours through into caves where the bats make their flights. I longed to get out and breathe, and to feel a little more upliftment than the television and hotel coffee could give me.
A journey with air begins with a first breath, that moment of really arriving in this physical life. Which is interesting because of course when we breathe in, we are breathing in spirit... inspiration. And when I've been filled with blissful inspiration, I've often felt like I could take off into the air. It's what that word ‘elation’ is all about. I have memories of walking alone in my small childhood city, as a teenager, to some Friday night gathering, and just feeling great bubbles of joy for no reason rising as I walked, or floated, through the suburban streets. So there's something about air being a place of veils, of feeling the physical world on the outbreath, the world of energy and spirit on the inbreath. And the more we take in... The more we might swell like an energetic balloon. And maybe even take off. Air is so much about movement, and it's in the air that we literally feel what freedom is; it's no wonder we love that feeling of moving through it.
I believe I can fly. Cue harmonies. But seriously, my journey with flight began, as I recall, at the age of three when spying a helipad near Seeligsburg in Switzerland, and my father jokingly telling me, that was the transport the Maharishi used to get to heaven. I incorporated this idea into a story I wrote a few years later, about the day the children took over heaven.
It was perhaps a little prophetic on my dad's part because a year or two later, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (founder of Transcendental Meditation, guru to The Beatles and eminent holy person my parents followed around for a while) introduced the TM-Sidhi techniques for advanced meditators, which included the ancient sage Patanjali's levitation sutra teaching among many others. Soon there were people bouncing around in lotus position on foam mattresses in my childhood home. Years later I would have a go myself at this spiritual piloting, on my second visit to the Drakensberg: I was going to learn to join the bats in the air.
We ate delicious light vegetarian food, and tuned into our floating inner world. There were middle class Durban Indian families, corporate types from Joburg, a Concorde pilot finding another way to fly, an Italian who was convinced this was the best route to meeting aliens (as recommended by a professor from Emory University in the US), some hippy Joburg girls who snuck off fairly regularly to smoke weed (very much against the rules), and a young liberal American boy obsessed with his own country's dramatic election (which at that stage was famously coming down to a few ballot boxes in Florida) and the possibility of electing an idiot for a president (par for the course worldwide these days apparently).
The point, ostensibly, was not so much to take off personally like Aladdins without carpets, as to throw out all the stress that was stopping the possibility of defying gravity (according to Hindu scriptures and quantum physics, seen from one interpretation). And I'm quite prepared to believe that in earlier times, lifting off was a trait that more of us might have had access to. (St Joseph of Cupertino is one levitating saint who sceptics in the west have done their best to put down, theorising that he accidentally ate LSD and just thought he was flying, though that doesn't explain the eye witnesses).
I mean, we do it in our dreams, right? Must be possible, in my book of conquering a hundred impossible things before breakfast. My mother was convinced she saw Maharishi take a minimally visible little public flight in the auditorium she was in for a lecture, for the very prosaic reason that he needed to get on stage in the right timing and somebody had forgotten to place steps on the side.
There was a stage where the new levitating meditators did bizarrely show off their skills with hopping races over great foam circuits, recorded for posterity on VHS. These days it's all rather more subdued when it happens. But I can definitely report that the energy stirred up in that process was quite remarkable, and it definitely felt like a lot got released. It might not have looked like much ('matter and materialism in the world is currently too dense to allow serious takeoff', goes the official reasoning, for we are in Kali Yuga according to Hindu cosmology, the heaviest and most difficult of the great eras, and it's potentially up to human will-power to gradually turn that around). But it certainly feels like a great weight is removed, one feels lighter, and the surge of energy can take one up and along much more smoothly than you'd be able to do with maximum focus and effort, especially in the lotus position.
Johannesburg is of course famous for its thin air, a city at an altitude considerably higher than the summit of Table Mountain, and much more polluted. I did some bouncing there too, on foam laid out in a high level office block belonging to a South African investment bank, in rundown downtown Jozi twenty years ago. It was part of an interesting project, the CIDA City Campus business college for promising students from poor backgrounds, many of whom were also bouncing around with this Eastern spiritual technology and seemingly super energised by it. The weird spiritual things on which I've always thrived do tend to come up against sceptical gatekeepers sooner or later if they don't break through to the mainstream, but luckily after some hiccups the idea continues. The part of the school that still includes meditation in the curriculum carries on life in inner Joburg as the Maharishi Institute today, and for what it's worth was recently recognised by Stanford as one of the twelve most innovative higher education institutions worldwide. So there.
On the other hand, my explorations have also shown me that this kind of energy is available in other ways. I would equate that urge to take off with a bubbling burst of kundalini energy, and there's a lot one can do with that (and apparently a lot that can go wrong, like a bad head rush that burns through energy circuits, if the stories are to be believed). The Chi, the Prana, the divine energy available in the air can be felt in a myriad of ways and spread its goodness when we pause enough to breathe it in. When we tap into an energy field, with the aid of that simple grateful connection with oxygen, we're experiencing something profound there in the air that is much more than our limited physical perceptions allow for. The luminous egg, as Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan would have it, as well as many shamanic and spiritual traditions I've encountered, or the etheric sheath and the astral body described by Rudolf Steiner and others.
Of course, much of this might be not air but that curious spiritual fifth element, ether. The boundary is rather porous and air is definitely our access point either way: conscious breath can help one to ground and feel the physical body, or feel and expand beyond it. It's probably why I've felt so elated in the high mountains, where it's easy to recognise the winds as beings of spirit. Another teenage memory: clambering rapidly over rocks with risky ledges, way ahead of my father and brother, and feeling fearless. More than one friend has been caught out by such a belief, and I'm much more cautious on the peaks today. But there's something about connecting with eternity that happens in that place where there's only air above, for as far as the eye can see and the heart can feel.
We all long for that freedom from gravity, even if sometimes the reality of takeoff is terrifying. I've never wanted to bungee jump in spite of the thrill, but I have walked on slack lines and flown down foofie slides (ziplines for the less South African reader) with my daughters on great community camps we set up for the dads and kids of our school, when they were younger. I've jumped into deep rivers on kloofing expeditions through the Cape mountains, sometimes with teenagers seeking challenges, where the only way out is down the gorge. And the thrill of course is... being momentarily closer to what lies beyond it all. Flying like the gods in their vehicles.
Being out in beautiful, airy places obviously supports this , but at times I've explored other more ecstatic breathwork practices inside and in group settings, not quite with foam mattresses to bounce on but pretty close. Holotropic breathwork has been a source of clearing the mind and finding powerful visions, pages of my journals covered afterwards. I was told it's called holotropic because Stanislav and Christina Grof needed a fancy name for their beautiful practice, to describe something so simple and yet fundamental, otherwise nobody would take it seriously and realise how profound it can be. A little tongue in cheek perhaps, but still, deep breathwork is rather different to rocket science, and it's a lot easier to reach the heights with, if the space is held with presence and compassion. At a particularly low point in my life I took on cold water immersion via breathwork, and my breathwork teacher's combination of collective intensive mouth-breathing as a preparation for a slow water immersion was a revelation.
He was certainly not the first teacher to suggest that entering cold water is like a small experience of death, which can recalibrate the soul. Doing so slowly, in a freezing mountain pool filled by winter rain, after an evening and morning spent on deep levels of breathwork, was just the kind of ecstatic release that my spirit needed at the time. Wim Hof's breathing techniques were learnt from the yogis who traditionally survive naked up in the Himalayan snows. Our bodies are capable of much more than we realise, if we can get away from the distractions. We are, after all, mostly space, as physicists and mystics will tell you.
Landing back on the earth, and accessing all that energy right here, is one of the big tasks of our time, I would hazard. Not floating away with spirit, as too many men in particular have had a habit of doing over the centuries, a privilege often not available to women. And what can we do with it here? Performance needs breath, for a start. As a trombonist and singer I know about diaphragm breathing, converting that beautiful inbreath into a sweet tone for all. As an actor and speaker, those pauses to breathe are the moment of Nothing to allow the creative inspiration in.
On a Scottish mountain near Inchnadamph in Sutherland, you climb up to a plateau and are greeted with a strange memorial. In this remote place, a bomber lost its way and crashed during the Second World War, back when many service personnel (including my grandparents) were based in the remote north for a bunch of strategic reasons. The wreckage is still strewn, slowly rusting into the soil perhaps, in a remote place few souls find themselves wandering. A reminder, for me, of the mortality that the air holds; some of us had to jump like Icarus or Faust's son Euphorion. There are ways to build up that elation in smaller doses, as much shamanic dancing does in Africa. The Maasai jumpers, working with the energy build up that's possible in the air while remaining firmly connected to the earth on each descent, are only the most famous, for this understanding permeates much local ceremonial dancing in South Africa too, alongside working with the breath. In Waldorf/Steiner high schools, we work with the idea that students in grade 9 - aged 14/15 - need to engage with Levity in the curriculum to meet their own wild desires to take risks, to be unconstrained, to revolt, in a year when the power of their adolescent 'astral forces' is really unleashed (in South Africa, we usually do this partly through leading them on an epic full scale multi-cast Shakespeare production). But the following year they need to be helped to land, to experience Gravity, to find and experience the dark depths. Breathing is an essential metaphor throughout the Waldorf curriculum.
Osho was a controversial Indian guru, and I'm sure none of these male gurus are without their darker sides; brilliant and human and needing to show off their ego a little too. The trick is to gratefully glean what wisdom you can from them, and compost the rest. Osho devised a series of dynamic meditation practices he felt were more appropriate for busy westerners than traditional forms, as just sitting in stillness would be excruciating for them. One of his practices, of course, is ecstatic jumping.
We all want to take off. Can we land the plane, or are we heading into the stratosphere and taking the planet with us? Billionaires' rockets are, like the crashed bomber, a part of this so called 'century plus of flight' that engineers celebrate, as if the slowness of hot air balloons hasn't been around for longer, or the unphotographed levitators of the past. More complex engineered thrills with my children have included Gold Reef City's roller coasters in Johannesburg, and in the past, Ratanga Junction's in Cape Town. Though that rush from using all that heavy tech to feel weightless was definitely something we craved, the latter theme park didn't survive. Because who comes to Cape Town for an expensively maintained theme park, really?
After various financial rescue attempts Ratanga Junction crashed during 2020. Climbing to the top of Table Mountain that year I found hundreds of Capetonians, that would once have spent their Saturdays in the malls, instead having clambered up (the cable car was locked down too). The forests on the mountain's east slope were always busy too. The shops were open, but everybody who'd gone for a walk instead of being cooped up with the bugs was remembering the simple joys of getting out in the fresh air. Sure, there's another helipad there in the forest, to fight summer fires, and there are times when I'm very grateful for our ability to lift off using engines. But if we trust enough in the impossible, and take a little more time inside ourselves, wherever we are, we might find we can indeed take off, in a dynamic dance between sky and ground, using our own inner steam, fuelled by the mysteries in the air around us.
On my most recent trip to the Drakensberg we returned from an overnight stay in one of those beautiful caves, having witnessed some spectacular Bushmen paintings; the ancestors as usual knowing where to really get high on natural beauty. Bees are often seen as representatives of ancestral spirits, and there were plenty in flight along the way. But at the end of the hike, a purple and blue butterfly danced in front of me, and kept on dancing, leading me down the path like some kind of flying pied piper. Another reminder of the delicacy and possibility the air holds. Take a breath.