Cycles in Life, Breath and Thought

The Circular Intelligence of the Ouroboros

The OUROBOROS symbolizes the circular forces of nature: how self-reflection breeds change, how endings—painful as they are—create beginnings, how the search for self turns inward, and how everything moves, transforms, hibernates, and emerges again, until time folds back on itself.

The image is ancient, but its intelligence is immediate. Nothing is wasted. Nothing truly ends. Everything returns, altered.

Déjà Vu and the Fracture of Time

The French concept déjà vu, literally “already seen,” captures this phenomenon with remarkable precision: a fracture in time that is both eerily familiar and entirely un-encountered, like a perfectly fitting puzzle piece in the wrong color.

It's the feeling of recognizing something before the mind can label and categorize it, which leaves us with unfettered presence.

Breath as a Living Circle

Dreams can usher us into this state, as can meditation, psychedelics, or other practices that disrupt habitual patterns. Embodied breath moves like the ouroboros, too, with a supple, circular quality that never fully completes.

If we pay attention, we find an inherent relationship between segments of the breath: the end of the inhale contains the seed of exhale, and the end of the exhale contains the origin of the next inhale.

Nothing breaks. Nothing collapses. One phase quietly becomes another.

Beyond Mechanics: Manomani

Experiencing the breath this way takes us beyond the mechanics of conventional breathing, creating a calibrating, diffusing effect in the realm of the mind (manas).

The Hatha Yoga Pradipika uses the term manomani — “that state where the mind becomes open or empty,” or, in non-dualistic terms, “dissolves into its source.” (HYP 2.42)

We glimpse a moment free of preference, habit and internal commentary . . .

The Space Before Reaction

Devoid of thought, mind gives way to consciousness — a pure, unshaped awareness much like the state we are born into. Before life inscribed its habits, worries, attachments, and insecurities, the mind was open and fluid, alert to what arose without clinging.

With time, practice, and a little bit of faith, we can again find space amidst our thoughts: that narrow, almost imperceptible sliver of time between experience and reaction — and the freedom that pulses beneath the grooves of memory and expectation.