cycle length: 12 weeks - 18 hours

If we were capable of forming every whole while taking air into account, our totalities would lose their systematic and authoritarian nature. They would also remain capable of transformation in order to enter into relations with an other, or to form a community with others, without each losing their singularity. A cultivation of our breathing, of our breath, allows us to be more malleable, to adapt ourselves to a situation without submitting to it. We, then, can endeavor to make our breath more vital or more subtle, staying alive but modifying our manner of being and acting according to the context. Neglecting the necessity and the potential of breathing, our tradition has rendered our subjectivity both weak and rigid because it is frightened of any change. As it has received its contours and forms from an outside world more than from its own life, it does not know how to deal with its presumed self.

— Luce Irigaray, ‘Through Vegetal Being’

Oftentimes, out of the blue, a student sends a message describing a breakthrough: the emergence of something that they suddenly perceived/ felt/ integrated. Arising from work that's been established in the breath for quite some time, an experience had finally navigated its way through in its very own time-space.

How to learn and move from breath rather than perform it and impose our conditioning onto it?

The mere potency of breath to produce knowledge is an incredible expression of self-empowerment, relational awareness, and surrender of control. This becomes particularly vital when facing the aggressive social construct that we are subjected to: the rule of speed, stress, and separation.

Breath is what all living beings share without discrimination. It is our most reliable and accessible tool for both self-empowerment and connection.

Breath is non-hierarchical, non-authoritarian, supportive, and always responsive. It cannot be monetized, possessed, bought, sold, extracted, or exhibited.

Breath-centered pedagogy, therefore, is of no interest to consumerist, control-driven, or achievement-oriented socio-economic systems.

But how does breath support our individual and collective health?

As a perpetual student of breath, Yalda Younes considers that a profound venture into respiration leads to an inquiry into the interconnectedness of all things. By deepening the understanding of the relationship between the inhale and the exhale (gateway to all internal bodily systems), a regular tending to breath translates into a deeper understanding of the nature of movement and relationships with other living beings, structures of power, and natural forces.

The subtle layers of breath movements are endlessly beautiful. So gentle, yet so potent. And despite occasional breakthroughs punctuating long realms of patience, an inquisitive practice never reaches an endpoint. Because, like all matter, the body (including the mind) is subject to continuous change. An anchoring practice is thus the process of observing and working with these internal changes in relation to external changes and constants, such as the vital life force, or prana, and the gravitational force, or apana.

Younes' teachings of fundamentals of breath facilitate innumerable explorations of dynamic relationships, such as those between: