WILFIRED EHRMANN INTERVIEW WITH PETRI BERNDTSON
Wilfried: When did the idea come to you, to see breathing at the root of all being? When I first heard this approach, I thought it is crazy and audacious.
Petri: The idea came in 2006, when I worked on my master thesis on breathing, and read Luce Irigaray’s book: “The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger“. In the beginning, I did not think about ontology, although Heidegger was famous for his phenomenological ontology, so I received some seed. Then I found an article by David Michael Levin on “Logos and Psyche – A Hermeneutics of Breathing”. In Heidegger’s book “Being and Time“ (Sein und Zeit) anxiety plays an important role and he very briefly mentions that it is connected with shortness of breath. Some psychologists like Fritz Perls, founder of gestalt therapy noticed the disturbance of breath due to anxiety. In his article, Levin says that Heidegger phenomenological analysis of Angst is short-sighted, because it does not go into the question of breathing. In “Being and Time“, there is only one sentence on breathing. In it Heidegger connects anxiety with a stifling of the breathing. Levin also talks about the respiratory body mentioned by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. According to Merleau-Ponty the respiratory body gives us the first experience of space. Levin concluded that the breathing body is our first openness to being. These ideas were the seeds for me, and then little by little at the end of my Master Thesis I felt that I had some ideas which I had never seen before, and I felt in a sense that it is my moral duty and responsibility towards humanity to explore these insights. When I started my work for my PhD, it was not yet about ontology, but in the second year it went onto ontology. Then I found a quote from Merleau-Ponty, although he never explains what it means: “There is really and truly inspiration and expiration of being, respiration within being.“ In connection with the quote from Levin, it becomes clear that the respiratory body is the first opening to being. When Heidegger says “Es gibt Sein“ (“there is being”), and this is the first truth, from where all other truths open up, so I thought, maybe there is a secret hidden in these in these phrases by Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger .
In 2008 I found Gaston Bachelard’s book “Air and Dreams“, and I intertwined the ontological thoughts of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty with Bachelard and a few ideas from Irigaray and Levin. The bringing together of these thinkers gave me an understanding that a phenomenological ontology of breathing could contain incredible possibilities.
Wilfried: When we switch from the mental to the personal level, is there any personal story about breathing? So have you encountered any changes in the relationship to yourself and your breathing due to these studies?
Petri: Definitively, everything has changed. For example, I have taken the following quote of Elias Canetti so deeply into my heart: “It is not enough to think, one also has to breathe. Dangerous are the thinkers who have not breathed enough“. Inspired by Canetti my own principle of respiratory philosophy guides me all the time, my thinking as well as my being and my way of living: that all things, all important philosophical questions, all important phenomena of life need to be rethought, re-examined and re-experienced within the experiential atmosphere of breathing. The basic question in my book “Phenomenological Ontology of Breathing: The Respiratory Primacy of Being” (Routledge 2023) is: What does a simple three word sentence mean “We breathe air”? What is the ontological meaning of these three words: “We”, “breathing” and “air”. “We” refers to human and other breathing beings. There is the “air”, and breathing is the connection between “we” and “air”, with its reversibility, as it perpetually turns towards us and towards the air. The inbreath and the outbreath are in a constant cycle. Inspiration is breathing in and expiration is breathing out, and respiration is re-spiration which means that the cycle is repeating itself and returning to the beginning all the time. We have to return to that all the time, and that is truly an experiential question.
When I turn to the personal question I can say that it started with Zen meditation, which for me was nothing else than what Buddha was talking about in Anapana-Sati (mindfulness of breathing): You just sit and let the breathing happen, trying to be as aware as possible. I started with Zen at 19, and it has been a constant practice for me ever since. This practice is for me nothing else than sitting in this mystery of ”we breathe air”. In a sense you could say, even if I do not mention it, but for me, when I was writing my PhD and my book, the basic idea was that it is a kind of conceptualization of my own personal experience of mindfulness of breathing, with the help of and in dialogue with the Western tradition of phenomenology of the mentioned philosophers. In my latest article that was published in “The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Mindfulness” (Routledge 2024), I explicitly try to interpret Buddha’s Anapana-Sati and his four noble truths, the way out of dukkha. In a sense Buddha was a phenomenologist of the breath. Dukkha does not originally mean suffering, even if this word is normally translated in this meaning. In my interpretation the original meaning of dukkha is “narrow openness” or “bad openness”. Buddha says that nirvana is the greatest sukha, which is traditionally translated as happiness or bliss. Etymologically, we have du-kha and su-kha. Kha means openness or air. Su- means good or extensive and du- is bad or restricted. Dukkha is a restricted openness to the world as our perceptual openness to the world. When I look at this bottle, I perceive that it is open to me, but it is an endpoint to my perception, or when I look at you as a person, but there is an endpoint as my perception is limited to either this bottle or you. Breathing is different compared to perception. In breathing, there is no endpoint. To breathe air is an extensive openness (sukha). Buddha attained enlightenment through the practice of Anapana-Sati as a respiratory practice of extensive openness, and this is why he emphasized this practice in his teaching.
Wilfried: We talk a lot about the breath as a door to oneself. Whenever you are aware of your breathing, you are connected with yourself. What does this mean in terms of ontology?
Petri: There are different layers of our being-in-the- world if we take phenomenological ontology as a starting point. Edmund Husserl in his late work stated that the lifeworld (“Lebenswelt”) is the beginning of all investigation. Heidegger calls it “being-in-the-world” (“In-der-Welt-Sein”) and Merleau-Ponty interprets it as bodily openness to the world. The different levels of our being-in-the- world are all our ways of being, ways of who we are or who I am. The self or the consciousness has a theoretical, social, practical and perceptual level, and in addition to these levels, there is the core which I call the respiratory level of the self. All these levels are certain ways of being-in-the-world. The self cannot be understood if it is not a certain way of relatedness.
When people say they go on an internal journey, I understand what they are saying, but truly there is no purely inner journey. A purely inner journey would mean, for example, to block one’s nose and mouth, because breathing is always a relationship with the outside. Then we are blocking our relatedness to the world. Holding the breath always ends in total anxiety, and that cannot be our true self. Thus, these different levels of one’s selfhood or of one’s being-in-the-world have their core, source or root in the respiratory body’s being-in-the-world.
In his famous book “Phenomenology of Perception”, Merleau-Ponty talks very briefly about falling asleep in connection to breathing. In order to fall asleep, we start to imitate the posture and breathing of the sleeper as if we were already sleeping. This “fake it till you make it”-attitude leads to the mysterious moment where the imitation suddenly turns into real sleep. Merleau-Ponty says in this description of sleep that with our respiratory communication we come in contact with something mysterious which he calls “some immense exterior lung”. He never explained what he means by this expression. In this respiratory communication or communion, this immense exterior lung starts to breathe us and takes over our being creating a certain respiratory rhythm.
This respiratory rhythm is, according to Merleau-Ponty, my very being (“mon être même”). In “Phenomenology of Perception”, he uses this expression “my very being” only twice. The second time he speaks of my very being, he says that the intertwining of my being and the being of the world is my very being. When I connected these two quotes in my book, I interpreted that at the deepest level the being of the world is some immense exterior lung. This is the deepest truth of what Merleau-Ponty means by the being of the world. Being intertwined with this immense lung in a respiratory communication it is this immense lung as the invisible air that penetrates us in a loving manner and takes care of us. That is our deepest way of being-in-the-world and also our deepest way of existing as a self (my very being). In my interpretation e.g. in the Upanishads this is called atman. This term is normally translated as higher self or higher soul, but the etymology of atman is Atem, breath. I would like to connect atman to Merleau-Ponty’s “my very being” as the human being’s connection to some immense exterior lung, which perhaps could be interpreted as a certain kind of brahman. So there would be an atman-brahman relation.
Wilfried: How could breathwork profit from your philosophy?
Petri: Breathwork could truly profit immensely by studying the phenomenology of breathing. I have thought about this question in connection with experiential breathing. Breathworkers have a natural tendency towards existential philosophy and phenomenology although they are not conscious about it. Most of my colleagues work on the subject of respiratory phenomenology in the academic world only on a cognitive level which is important but for myself, it is even more important that at the experiential and philosophical level, I do not only talk the talk but that I also walk the walk. For me, the most important guiding principle is the phrase from Canetti that I already quoted: “it is not enough to think, one also has to breathe. Dangerous are the thinkers who have not breathed enough.”
To truly become radical (in the sense of going to the roots) breathworkers means to explore the question: What makes breathwork breathwork? How does it in its essence differ from other traditions? What is truly unique in breathwork? What is “breath” and what is “work” and how do they intertwine in breathwork? The breathworkers have this huge adventurous attitude of going into the experience as deeply as possible. In general, breathworkers are lacking their own vocabulary. They have taken their way of speaking not from the depths of their respiratory experience but from New Age language, from Eastern philosophy and from science. The breathwork community could begin to cultivate a certain kind of poetic language of breath. This would mean to learn to speak in a completely new manner, learn to express the world in a new way, not by borrowing the words and theories from somewhere else, but a language that grows from the breathwork experience. In the one to one or group sessions, people have deep going and life changing experiences, but the words are taken from somewhere else, not from those experiences.
Even if breathworkers are so enthusiastic about breathing, for some reason they have forgotten the air. They look at each other and encounter each other while breathing, but it is the invisible air with its openness and hospitality that makes it possible that we come closer to each other or distance ourselves. If there would be stuff (visible things) between us, this connection would be blocked and we could not see each other or come closer to each other. So it is this hospitality of the invisible air that lets us hear and see each other and move around. In connection to all of this as a context we need to ask what does it truly mean: We breathe air? It is a naive but radical starting point and to see what kind of stuff grows out with this fundamental question, when you go deeper into the experience of breathing air.
Wilfried: There is a lack of vocabulary, and I think this has to do with the fact that our language is so external for practical reasons. The inner insights are rare in history but become more and more, as more people go inside, meditating or contemplating and that we just do not have the words for describing our inner experiences. When there is a group of people who share about their experience in breathwork, it is only shallow. One can get a feeling about what has changed in the person, but the words are far too superficial.
Petri: You say that the experiences of going inside are so rare. But I challenge this expression: It is not only that I go inside, but that I invite the air to come in me and let the air start to work in me. It is a collaboration of inside and outside , when the air comes to me. Bachelard has the idea that the air has its own imaginations, like all the other elements. We could call breathworkers as potential aerial poets. They devote themselves to this imaginative and magical air they invite into themselves. This air then creates new ideas and images, new words, new ways of being. Bachelard said: Let us become as aerial as breath. In German there is the word “Luftmensch (Luftikus)”, which has a derogative aspect pointing at people who are unpractical, but this word should be taken seriously to state what does it mean in a true sense to be a breathworker: Yes, we are airy people and you are missing out on something which is truly essential and most important in life unless you become a Luftmensch (a human being of the air).
Wilfried: We say in breathwork, that it is not the breathing person, the sitter or therapist, but it is the breath and the air, which does the work.
Petri: It is this immense air, which makes it possible. When that immensity of air comes to us in breathwork, it allows us to really feel immense. We expand in so many different directions. It is the air that starts working in its immensity and it makes us more immense because it loves us so much, it wants us to become as immense as possible. We would not be these anxious people – anxiety is the total opposite to immensity. In Latin, anxiety means angustia – narrowness, not only in choking, but in every possible sense. Bachelard says in his book “The Poetics of Reverie”, that anxiety is fictitious, which means that it is only secondary and manmade. We are made to breathe well; it is our nature to breathe well. Anxiety is not how this world created us.
