One afternoon last week, near the end of a physical workout at home, I felt a fluttering in my chest. I took my pulse, and it was very erratic: fast beats followed by a long pause, more fast beats, another long pause, etc. After a couple of minutes of more of the same, I called 911. By the time the ambulance arrived, I was much improved. But the EMTs noted enough ongoing irregularity in my heartbeat that they thought I should go to the emergency room. But they thought it was okay for me to drive there myself. Further tests have all been normal so far. My palpitations, as far as I could tell, subsided within a quarter of an hour, and they have not returned.
The reason I wrote the paragraph above is not to report on my health, but rather to allow me to report on my reaction to the situation. I felt frightened, but I also felt serene. The possibility of dying entered my mind, and that thought was met by another thought—a thought that did not make it into words but that was clear: My life is complete. I have achieved what I wanted to achieve. There are no loose ends. I have achieved happiness.
The year 2020, despite you-know-what, was for me the happiest year of my long and happy life. There is nothing for happiness like the achievement of lifelong goals, and that is what I achieved in 2020. I have heard it said that the striving for a goal is more rewarding than the achievement and the aftermath. From personal experience, I can state, “Not so.”
In 2020, I completed a thirty-year project—or should I say pipe dream—that I thought I would never complete: a treatise on epistemology. The book offers my original answer to every major open question in epistemology. (Of course, my answer will raise new open questions—as, happily, the quest for knowledge never ends—but those new questions are for the next philosophers to answer.) In 2021, my production continues. I have completed a second edition of my book on sexual orientation—see this nice review last month in American Thinker—and I am very happy with the additions I made to the chapter on romantic love.
But my writing—mainly my writing on epistemology—is only half of my life’s work, only half of my achievement that I was able to call “complete” in 2020. The other half is something I have worked on more than anything else for the past forty years. When it occurred to me that I have not written publicly about this other work, it also occurred to me that my life has a loose end after all. So I am tying up this loose end by writing this post.
My main quest for the past forty years has been to free my breathing.
One summer day in 1983, when I was 28 years old, I was lying on the floor (on my back) during the warmup segment of an acting class. My teacher—the late Clifford David—came over and pushed on my belly. I began coughing. The coughing ended, and breath rushed in to my body in a way I did not remember ever experiencing. I burst into jolly laughter. Breath was coursing in and out of me, and this breathing was more pleasurable than any sensation I had every experienced. It seemed as though the inside of my body was receiving some kind of sensuous massage.
My breathing felt effortless—as if my past way of breathing had been work—but had a power I had never experienced. I was riding a giant wave instead of trying to manufacture a ripple. Perhaps because it was effortless, this new breathing did not seem like part of some kind of heightened state, but rather seemed like a natural state that I could remain in all the time. It was the old way that seemed unnatural in comparison.
For the next day or so, I experienced this state for much of the time. Then my old way of breathing returned, but with a difference: This old way was no longer acceptable to me. For the next forty years, I struggled to return to free breathing.
I would return from time to time—for a few minutes, for an hour—and then I would go long stretches in frustration. I studied everything I could find about how to reach this state of freedom and joy. (Some disciplines call this state “bliss.”) I studied with the teacher—a brilliant yoga teacher and body worker named Leslie Kaminoff—who had taught Clifford David to push on my belly in a certain way. I studied many other disciplines too. (In addition to Clifford David and Leslie Kaminoff, teachers I am deeply grateful to are Saul Kotzubei, Beth Gudenrath, Catherine Fitzmaurice, and Graham Beckel.) I progressed gradually, developing a personal technique that enabled me to reach this state of bliss more and more often.
In 2020, I progressed to the degree that I was in bliss for a significant part of virtually every day.
We all have seen videos of individuals who hear sound for the first time, or see colors for the first time. My reaction—every time—to experiencing free breathing is similar. And now I experience this state of joy virtually every day.
I don’t know how to compare my state of free breathing to the breathing of other people. Perhaps my free breathing is mere normal breathing for others, as normal people take for granted the hearing of sound and the seeing of color. Or perhaps it is my old way of breathing that is normal for others. Either way, my forty years of struggle were worth it. I am fulfilled.
Update, May 7, 2023: To see me experiencing free breathing, see this playlist of short videos.