Nazareth Castellanos - The Bridge Where Butterflies Dwell
Lately, I've read two books by Nazareth Castellanos that repeatedly return to an idea that is also prevalent in neuroscience today: experience doesn't just happen in the mind, but in the continuous relationship between the body and the environment.
In this context, breathing isn't just a physiological process. It is one of the few bodily processes that we can voluntarily modulate, and that's why it becomes a very direct tool for influencing attention and our internal state.
What's interesting isn't breathing as a technique in itself, but what it reveals: that mental state isn't separate from bodily state. And that small changes in how we breathe modify the way we perceive what's happening to us.
In The bridge where the butterflies live, the concept of interoception appears: the organism's capacity to perceive its own internal state. This perception does not depend on a single system, but breathing is one of the most direct and accessible ways to observe it in practice.
From there, the practice ceases to be merely “observing the breath” as something isolated, and becomes training attention on a living, changing process, connecting body, environment and mind in the present moment.
It's not about reducing the experience to breathing. Rather, it's about recognising that breathing is already within the experience.
And at that point, observation ceases to be something that is “done” in a technical sense, and becomes more akin to a way of being:
“Focus on your breathing without altering it, respecting its essence, whatever it may be. Observe it as one who peeks out from a balcony without any intention of seeing anything. As if you knew you had to look with eyes that wait eternally. There is absolutely nothing else to do. Life allows us this hiding place.
