From Isis To The ICU

The Ancient Origins Of The Breath Of Life

I had an absolutely fascinating vision during a shamanic journey tonight, in which I ventured into the depths of a past life experience. In my trance state, I was taken to witness my murder. In that life, I was a wife, shrouded in brown robes, dying by the hands of a jealous husband consumed with rage. He strangled me to death, along with all of my handmaidens, who already lay lifeless on the floor.

Experiences like this are so surreal during my shamanic journey work. In the moment, I am acutely aware that I am witnessing myself in a past life, but accessing it from my current reality as a man in 2026! WILD!

The next part of my journey is when things got really interesting. My vision froze, becoming timeless in the moment, as the radiant light of Goddess Isis entered the room. She looked directly into my (current) eyes and instructed me to resuscitate the bodies that lay dead on the floor.

Following the instruction of Isis, I first kneeled above my past self, her body still warm on the cold stone tiles. Through the power and magic of Isis, her soul returned to the room and hovered above my head as a radiant white orb. It then descended into my body through my crown chakra. I held it within me for a moment before blowing it back into her lifeless body through her parted lips. She inhaled deeply before opening her eyes, awakening before me. Talk about multi-dimensional healing! One by one, I revived each of the lifeless bodies using my body and my breath as a channel for their souls.

As I reflected on the significance of this vision after my shamanic journey had ended, I began to wonder whether the “breath of life” I had been taught in medical school had a sacred and ancient origin…

The First Breath Of Man

Across almost every ancient tradition, breath is the medium through which the soul enters matter and is believed to be the mechanism by which the divine populates the physical world with living beings.

In the Hebrew Genesis, God did not simply speak humanity into existence, he brought it to life using his breath!

Adam, the first human being in the Abrahamic creation story, was first shaped from the earth and the nishmat chayyim, the breath of life, entered him directly through his nostrils and gave him life. This was the act that made Adam a living soul.

Ancient Egyptian Resuscitation

The ancient Egyptians understood the ka as one of the soul's primary aspects: a vital essence that entered the body at the time of birth and carried the breath during life until it departed at the time of death. This is why in funerary rites, the mouth was ceremonially opened so that the ka could move freely and the soul had a threshold to cross.

One of the most well known Egyptian Legends about the movement of the soul in the breath is that of Isis and Osiris. Isis was the wife of Osiris, who was murdered and dismembered by his brother, Set. His body parts were scattered across the land and it was Isis who gathered these pieces together and reassembled him. She is said to have hovered over his body in the form of a hawk, beating her great wings to stir breath back into his lungs and thus giving him back his life.

No wonder she was the Goddess that appeared in my vision!

Breath As A Vessel For The Soul

In yogic tradition, the word prana is usually translated as breath, though this doesn’t fully encompass its meaning. Prana is life-force itself, the animating energy that flows through all living things. Breath is simply its most obvious expression, the place where the invisible becomes visible and measurable. The practice of pranayama breathing has been used for centuries to direct this life-force within a body. The specific breathing techniques used in pranayama allow you to take conscious command of this animating current that runs through you.

Many shamanic and indigenous traditions hold the same understanding: that the shaman's breath is one of the primary vehicles for healing. To blow breath into a person, an object or over sacred herbs, involves the transfer of vital energy or the essence of pure healing light. It is an act of deliberate giving in which the shaman shares a sacred gift that they carry.

One of the most beautiful stories I have heard about the importance of breath in shamanic work comes from Peru. During the depths of nightfall, a group of shamans packed into a small hut to preform the Death Rites on a revered Master Shaman that had reached the end of his physical incarnation in this lifetime. They had all travelled from far and wide to support him during his passing. As he took his last breath, one of the shamans closest to him leaned forward and pressed his lips against the master’s. He received his last breath into his mouth. That breath, which was his departing soul or life-force, was then passed mouth to mouth to every shaman present in the room. It was held briefly in each body before finally being released out through an open window.

I absolutely adore the sentiment in this story. The sacredness of the breath, which could be received, held, passed on, and released with intention.

The Transition To Modern Times

In 1740, the Dutch surgeon William Tossach recorded the first modern clinical account of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, in which a person breathed directly into an unconscious patient to restart their life. It was considered unremarkable at the time, an extension of older practices, and it would be another two centuries before the medical establishment formally systematised it into what we now call CPR.

Today, a paramedic performing mouth-to-mouth on a stranger in the street is described in purely mechanical terms: oxygen transfer, lung inflation, cardiac rhythm restoration. The language is physiological and strips away everything that every human culture before ours understood about the gesture.

However, the sacred act itself remains unchanged, in which we breathe life back into a body that has stopped. Providing a rare opportunity for life to hopefully return…or to try to.

What is wild to me is that the knowledge that breath carries something more than air did not disappear, but it did get buried beneath the modern medical jargon in clinical settings. The connection to the soul became buried, while the technique remained on the surface.

The Shaman Becomes The Channel

As I reflected on my shamanic journey, what resonated so deeply with me was the passage of this soul energy through my body. It did not originate within me.

In shamanic work, we sometimes refer to ourselves as “hollow bones", a clear channel or conduit through which the healing happens. When I blew life back into those women I became a temporary vessel for a force that has been doing this work since before any of us had language for it.

This, I think, is what the shaman in the hut in Peru understood when he received his master's last breath. He did not hold onto it. He passed it on. He let it move. And when it had been held by every person in the room and been fully witnessed, he let it go out the window into the world.

Breath IS life. It is the essence of our soul. And during this fleeting and precious life we only hold it long enough to honour it before it moves back out an open window.