When the Air Gets Thin: Breathwork, Autumn, and Letting Go
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I’ll be blunt: I don’t recommend breathwork as a cure for grief. It’s not. But this year, after another cold morning where the house felt too quiet, I started using it as a way to keep my body from turning into a museum of her absence.
I’m a retired engineer, so I initially approached it like a tuning problem. Inhale four counts, exhale six. Simple. No app, no incense, no cosmic narrative required. I did it while sitting at the piano, because music taught me that the space between notes matters as much as the notes themselves. The exhale is the space.
What surprised me was how quickly the body responded. Not in a dramatic way. No tears, no vision, no sudden forgiveness. Just a loosening in the chest that made it easier to sit with the pain instead of being swallowed by it. I think that’s what a lot of us miss when we talk about “release.” We want the feeling to leave. Sometimes it just needs a slower door to walk out of.
There’s a tarot card I keep coming back to in this season: the Five of Cups. Three cups spill, and the figure is staring at them. It’s a good image for grief because the attention is fixed on what was lost, while two cups remain standing behind it. Not a solution. Just... presence. Autumn seems to pull that card out of the deck for me. The leaves aren’t dying in a tragic sense; they’re completing a cycle. That framing helps more than I expected.
I’m not claiming breathwork transforms the psyche in some universal way. In my experience, it’s closer to a practice of attention. You give the breath a shape, and the shape gives the mind a place to rest. I recall Jung talking about the unconscious needing to be brought into consciousness, not forced, not analyzed to death, but witnessed. Grief, to me, is one of those places where witnessing is the whole job.
So I’m curious: does anyone else use breath patterns as a kind of ritual boundary around grief? Not to fix it, just to mark it? And if you’re doing it, do you find the exhale more important than the inhale? For me, the long exhale is where the “letting go” actually lives.
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