Is there a story that could be told that isn’t ultimately about the experience of being in a body?

This is the yogic process: a churning ocean, a rumbling mountain, a game of cosmic tug-of-war, transmuted poison, and a pot of nectar … all within one body—yours, mine. Imagine that.

Horse myths are almost always related to the breath. Xanthus (Ξάνθος) and Balius (Βάλιος), the two horses of Achilles (Ἀχιλλεύς), are born from the generative wind. Two horses, born of the wind, that the hero must control. The journey of the hero, in the esoteric, yogic sense, is to be a “breath-controller” or a “horse-tamer” (ἱπποδάμοιο) which is what Homer called all his heroes.

Native American horse trainers tamed their steeds sometimes by getting nose-to-nose with the horse and trading breath. Imagine standing nose-to-nose with a wild horse—the fear in its eye, the fear in yours—and breathing together. It’s a precarious place, that place between tamed and untamed, between breath-power being harnessed and being unharnessed.