Breathing as the Biosphere
What does it feel like to dissolve your experience into the fluxes,
cycles and interconnections that sustain all life on Earth?
What if embodying the experience of a microbe in the carbon cycle or
a cloud in the water cycle was a pathway to experiencing Buddha Nature?
Breathing as the Biosphere is a collection of imaginal meditations that invite you to dissolve your boundaries with the infinity of nature. By embodying the Biosphere's breath, you are guided to journey, feel, and reimagine your relationship with the living world.
Using the metaphors of the biosphere’s breath as imaginal doorways into the depths of experience, the embodied imaginal journeys seek to awaken a sense of interdependence, fundamental goodness and empowerment, even in the face of fear, ecosystem grief, or other challenging emotions.
May you experience the awe, nourishment and love that arise from your interconnection with ecosystem energy, water, and carbon fluxes.
Flux mandalas are data visualizations representing the unique pattern of ecosystem functioning and meteorological data at FLUXNET research sites accross the world. Eddy-covariance flux towers measure carbon dioxide, water vapor, and energy exchanges between ecosystems and the atmosphere, allowing us to observe the radiant soul of living soils and plants interacting with climate, a constant giving and receiving that sustains life on Earth and brings us together.
The project features selected guided meditations and imaginal journeys developed collaboratively and iteratively through conversations and experimentations between creative, contemplative practitioners and ecosystem scientists, exploring at each step areas of overlap between Buddha Nature and Earth system processes in flux as imaginal somatic experiences, individually as well as in collective attunement.
The collection of meditations offer insights into how directly experiencing and embracing the ever-changing nature of ecosystems can create a sense of belonging and peace. Meditation can help transform grief into connection, anger into service and selflessness. Welcoming in environmental heartbreak or rage as a sacred sadness, creates an opportunity to feel more deeply connected to nature and open more fully and tenderly to the beauty and love of that.
Breathing as the Biosphere is a
Guided Imaginal Meditations
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Rosa Lewis brings you into the imaginal experience of becoming the soil and sensing the intricate web of life below ground. Through embodied awareness, you explore the textures, cycles, and interconnections of minerals, organic matter, air, water, and living organisms, uncovering the soil’s inner flux and renewal as a mirror for your own Buddha nature.
Maoya Bassiouni welcomes you into our shared breath with the biosphere. By mirroring how ecosystems exchange water, carbon, and energy, you practice exchanging self with other and embodying the radiant compassion of ecosystems. Through this exchange you practice finding rest in the continuum of grief and renewal.
Krisztina Lazar inspires you to dissolve physical boundaries and body to inhabit the breath of life, the Wind. The Wind animates the world around us, rustling the leaves on the trees. The ancients listened to these whispers of the leaves for oracles from the gods. But the trees listen also. They feel all of the information the wind carries, and they respond in kind. The forest breathing is the heartbeat of the biosphere. Enter into this living synthesis of sensorial awakening with an invitation to create an artwork at the end of the meditation. (coming soon)
Sam Hinds offers a gentil guide into imaginal practice. He opens a space for encountering the autonomy of the deep imagination, inviting the breathing of the Earth to introduce itself as image. The intention of this practice is to provoke contemplation of soul as part of the ecosystem.
Joost Vervoort explores urgent threats to our living planet, and how this relates to our capacity or lack of capacity to understand and engage with the turbulent, lively multidimensionality of the world. He guides you into taking on the role of a eddy-covariance sensor, a sonic anemometer 'listening' to the wind, to air flows and to qualities of the turbulence in the atmosphere.
Sara Bouchard takes us on a five movement journey with her electroacoustic composition for 12-voice choir and percussion, exploring the role of networks in locating one’s own voice within a shifting landscape. Using
the carbon cycle as a framework, the five movements (air, wood, soil, fire, breath) interweave musical performance, field recordings,
crowd-sourced text and scientific data. The artwork bridges ecological knowledge with personal and
collective experiences of climate change. (coming soon)
Shared Imaginal Practice
Shared Imaginal Practice is an opportunity to connect to the world and your experience in a new way — it opens a doorway into the embodied imaginal realm.
Sam and Rosa recorded their shared imaginal practice journeys in which they were connecting with the Biosphere through the imaginal realm. You can listen to their journeys as a guided meditation or as inspiration for what you may discover in your experience.
Shared Imaginal Practice is done in dyads or triads and if you want to try it with friends, you can find the instructions here
Some concepts that you could explore in the practice connected to Breathing as the Biosphere are:
Nature is a state of flux
Being one with nature
Breathing as the biosphere
A thriving ecosystem
Infinite interconnected relationships
Symbiosis with the planet
Climate destruction and renewal
Hearing the cries of the Earth
Flowing with infinite lifeforce
The boundless heart of the Universe
Sam goes on a journey through the fluxing, impermanent nature of experience. He delves into a symphony of continual motion and how that shows up in his connection with experience, from bodily sensations, to meaning resonances, to a connection with the cosmos.
Rosa goes on a journey of being one with nature, connecting with creativity and the resonant depths. She journeys through the boundless sense of non-conceptual, possibility space of nature that inspires a sense of reverence and the joy of how being a body allows us to experience it all.
Contributors
Rosa Lewis
As a mystic, meditation guide, artist and thought leader, Rosa envisions a world where both culture and science come to understand the ways that the imaginal realm is a core part of experience and reality. She is passionate about sharing a connection to experience that opens up more freedom, joy, wholeness, and access to truth. Her work combines Buddhist emptiness, shadow work, tantric embodiment, the archetypal realm, mysticism, and a radically new way of relating to the heart.
(rosalewis.co.uk | imaginaljourneying.com)
Maoya Bassiouni
As an environmental scientist, artist, and nomad at heart, Maoya's creative explorations play with rediscovering our relationship with our complex and ever-changing world. As an ecohydrologist, her research examines the interplay between soil, plants, water, and climate, revealing emergent patterns and eco-evolutionary principles accross scales. Her work combines physical theory and ecosystem ecology with data science to deepen our understanding of ecosystem services and their response to climate.
(maoyab.github.io | fluxnetart.github.io)
Sam Hinds
As a poet, psychotherapist, and imaginal practitioner, Sam writes about the depths of the imaginal realm, sharing the importance of how the imaginal isn’t just an individual experience but that group attunement allows people to feel richer collective currents of experience. He developed the Communal Reverie practice, which assist people with creative visions beyond modernity, in a way that values mystery, allows for things to have a life of their own and isn’t bound by rigid logic and linear unfolding.
(samhinds.com)
Krisztina Lazar
As a visionary artist, Krisztina explores deep archetypes and transformative themes, blending fantasy with hyperrealistic sacred art. As a lineage holder of the Mische Technique, she creates luminous works of imaginary realism, crafting otherworldly images that emerge from light rather than shadow. She teaches her unique painting methods and curates exhibitions, embodying a creative practice rooted in mysticism, cultural symbolism, and personal transformation.
(transcendentbird.com | @krisztina_lazar_art)
Joost Vervoort
As an ecological futurist, researcher, and musician, Joost works at the intersections of imagination, activism, and creative expression. His projects uncover what structural conditions are necessary for people to access the deep mystery of life. His work explores how collective visions of the future can shape transformative action in the present and spans investiagting art’s role in stimulating societal transformations to developing an inappropriately joyous video game about saving the planet.
(JMVervoort.uu.nl | dharmagarage.com)
Sara Bouchard
As a multidisciplinary artist and composer, Sara uses sound, installation, performance, creative coding and visual media to interweave song and the landscape. Sara’s work often gives voice to natural entities, and her collaborations with the environment have included data sonifications, sensor-driven soundscapes and musical improvisations with field recordings and organic materials. Sara looks to the more-than-human world for teachings on care and resilience so as to strengthen our local and global communities, nourish each other and flourish in an uncertain future.
(sarabouchard.com/ | @seventh_sara)
Crowd-Sourced Video Mandala
By embracing the feeling of being a part of the biosphere, individually and collectively stitching together moments of presence and connection to ecosystems, we can create a quiet revolution that both inspires and resources people. We hope that the video that we create together becomes a collective mandala that represents the beauty of humans and ecosystems across the world being interconnected.
We invite you to connect with nature and capture a video clip of your experience to submit to the project. Your contemplation could be a walk, a sitting meditation or something more interactive. It could include some singing, spoken words, the sounds of nature, or be in silence. The purpose is for you to be present and feel a sense of belonging in the biosphere, in a way that is supportive, evocative, playful or inspiring for you. We look forward to receiving your submissions.
Your Clips Wanted | Submit here: https://bit.ly/fluxart-submit-video-mandala/
10 - 60 seconds of video, capturing a moment of resonance with nature.
Film with a phone in landscape format. Provide short description and location of your video
