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Hanging from the bulletin board at my grocery store is a patchwork of business card and colorful flyers. Among the papers, one poster caught my eye: it advertised a class on breathing. Hmm. How odd.

Being raised in Ohio, I thought-- this must be a West Coast thing.
Do we really need a class to learn how to breathe?

Have we modern humans disconnected ourselves so much from our bodies that we really have forgotten how to breathe?
Well, we certainly haven't forgotten how, in the biological sense, but maybe we have lost something.

It began to make more sense to me, I mean, look at this world we live in.

We move in a society that values speed, power, and agility. Our culture rewards success and status; wealth and beauty.

Given this context, sitting around listening to the sound of air going in and out of your body seems like a foolish thing to do.

It won't make you rich and famous, and it certainly won't give you buns of steel.

But could breathing bring more compassion, reduce violence, and even help to repair the world?

I believe that paying attention to the way you breath can give you a first-hand experience of being connected with everybody and everything around us.

And that this personal experience can transform the communities in which we live.

I realize that this is an ambitious claim.
It's no more ambitious than eight people sitting around a living room thinking they can build a church.

It is no more ambitious than your congregation's vision for creating a religious community that is a haven, and a model of ethical living.

In claiming your identity as a religious body, you have set aside this space and this time to make a holy sanctuary for the sake of repairing the world.

This morning's meditation may have been challenging for you. Maybe you felt some discomfort or pain.
For people living with emphysema, cystic fibrosis, or asthma this pain is in the very act of breathing.

And even for people who do not suffer from those illnesses, sitting in silence, breathing in and out uncovers hidden emotional pain or brings new awareness to sore muscles and joints that makes this exercise unbearable.

Maybe you didn't experience anything during the meditation. Maybe it felt a little "new-agey" or overly sentimental.

I understand that voice of caution. The responsible use of our ability to reason and to think rationally is a critical religious practice for Unitarian Universalists.

It protects us from harmful idolatry and thoughtless ideology.

We Unitarian Universalists do not rely external authority to tell us what to think and believe.
We rely on personal experience--experience of the mind, as well as experience of the body.

Among the five sources of our Living Tradition, direct experience-- embodied experience of transcending mystery and wonder is at the top of the list.

What kind of direct experience can we actually gain from mindful breathing?

The breath can keep us attentive to the inseparability of creation. Poet and musician Joy Harjo describes this idea in her poem, FIRE:

a woman can't survive
by her own breath
alone.

look at me
i am not a separate woman
i am a continuance
of blue sky

i am the throat
of the sandia mountains

a night wind woman
who burns
with every breath
she takes

Similarly, In Mexico's eastern Sierra Madres Mountains, the Raramuri, the indigenous people of that land refer to soul and breath with one word: iwi.

This concept allows them to relate to all forms of life -- from parrots and frogs, to orchids and volcanic rock. Countless of us exist in everything and everything exists in us. That's how close we all are.

Of course, not every image of our connection is beautiful and poetic.

Yellow Dust is a stark example of how the actions of one group of people can literally affect the breathing of others half-way around the globe.

This mass of dust starts in the Gobi Desert, picks up chemical pollutants above China and crosses the Pacific Ocean on California-bound air currents.

Pollutants go in the other direction, too, in the form of excessive consumerism and western chauvinism.

A consistent practice of mindful breathing can keep us connected to this important truth: our actions, thoughts and attitudes impact the lives of people we will never meet.

Even after years of meditation, it's still hard for me to consistently experience that sense of oneness with the web of life.

What I do gain from mindful breathing is an expansion of my awareness, that is, my ability to be awake.

I started this practice about five years ago. I was working as a software consultant, traveling to client sites every week and feeling increasingly disconnected from family, friends, and myself.

Due to my work schedule, I stopped going to church. I became entrenched in a world of flight schedules, rental cars, laptops, cell phones, and maximizing efficiencies.

A world that felt entirely hostile to the cultivation of a strong inner life.

As I spent more time in front of my computer than with people, I began to feel more like a machine-- and less like a living, breathing human being.

Then one day, in an airport bookstore, I found a copy of Thich Nhat Hahn's "The Miracle of Mindfulness".
I started meditating in my hotel room. Months later, I noticed my breathing during the day.

Breathing is the only human physiological function, which is voluntary and involuntary, shifting between the two modes like an alternating current, dipping into both conscious awareness and unconsciousness.

It is possible to pass the entire day without noticing one inhalation or one exhalation.
We breath as though we are asleep.

And often, we live as though we are asleep.
In our sleep-walking we inadvertently bump into things--
we damage the earth, we pollute the air.
We support systems that perpetuate oppression and racism.
We make other people feel diminished and unworthy.

For some people, facing the fact
that they have harmed others,
that they have not acted justly,
that they have not loved mercy
is so painful that they need sedatives to stay asleep.

These sedatives come in many familiar forms: pills and liquids, overbooked schedules, shopping, food, work.

We know, of course, that we will eventually have to wake up and face those very human shortcomings

But, please, I urge you, DONT wait the very last day of your life.

A practice of mindful breathing keeps us awake.

Awake to what Unitarian minister, William Ellery Channing described as the "essential enduring good: that is the health, power and purity of our own soul".

It also keeps us awake to our contribution to destruction rather than life, to despair, rather than hope.

Philosopher Gabriel Marcel interviewed many French victims of Nazi Concentration Camps following WWII. He concluded, " there is the closest of connections between the soul and hope.

Hope is for the soul what breathing is for the living organism. Where hope is lacking, the soul dries up and withers."

You lovers of words will appreciate the close connection between the words hope, aspire, spiritus, inspire, to breathe.

Just breathing is a bold act of creation--the creation of HOPE.

In the book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible a creation story is told:
When God began to create heaven and earth,
the earth was unformed and void,
with darkens over the surface of the deep and the breath of God sweeping over the water.

I imagine that this was much like our early life in our mothers' womb.
No separation between light of day and dark of night.
No separation between dry and wet.
But there-- there was the very breath of God, the spirit of hope and anticipation sweeping over the deep.

In most world religions; the word "breath" is linked to the divine life force, soul or spirit.
Rabbi Lawrence Kushner says: "The holiest Name in the world, the Name of the Creator, is the sound of your own breathing."

For me, mindful breathing reminds me that I have the power to create the next moment of my life.

During the day when my breathing is on auto-pilot, it is my physical body that creates the next moments of my biological life.
My heart beats and the autonomic response forces breath.

If, on the other hand, I am paying attention,
each breath becomes my conscious desire
to live another moment and
to live it in such a way that blesses the world.

Writer Diane Ackerman explains it this way:
"when we breathe we pass the world through our bodies, brew it lightly, and turn it loose again, gently altered for having known us."

Breathing in the face of pain and grief is an act of hope.
Breathing in the face of hatred and violence is an act of hope.

What would happen if large numbers of people started paying attention to the way they breathe?

Is it possible that this simple act could
repair our broken relationships
and create new possibilities on earth?

We often think of Spiritual awakening as a very personal and individual quest.

And while this is true, it cannot be the end. Individual enlightenment is merely the first step because the transformed mind leads to transformed actions, which leads to a transformed society. This is what happened to Channing. The more he developed his inner powers, the more he was able to see the oppressive elements in his world that were keeping others from embodying all their powers. This is how he came to become an outspoken critic of slavery.

So for us, spiritual awakening must go beyond individual salvation to collective salvation.

We must claim our authority to work for the salvation of our world, our communities, our families.

And what is it that we must be saved from?
from our self-centeredness,
our irresolvable greed,
our inconsolable fear of the other,
and all that keeps us bound to a cycle of exploiting the earth and each other.

What would happen if we all woke up?
What would we see?
What would we hear?
What would we know?

We would see the hate-filled graffiti on school walls disappear. We would see white supremacy groups like the National Alliance, who left their calling cards in Petaluma a few months ago, find better things to do with their energies.

We would hear the cries of the voiceless in our community--
those without shelter, families living in poverty, people who cannot access adequate healthcare and respond with compassion.

If we all woke up, we would find ourselves extending compassion and care beyond our family and friends to embrace strangers; people of differing races, and backgrounds.

And on that day we would know in our heart that their well-being is our well-being.

We dare to envision a world like this.

Because ours is a faith built by big thinkers and grand dreamers.

Ours is also a faith that looks for answers to life's most difficult questions in the most unlikely places-- in the wisdom of ancient Sufi mystics, in the precision of mathematical equations, the inexplicable power of love, and even, in the way we simply breathe.