Are We One or Are We Many?
You are always breathing in or breathing out. Until you are not. Meanwhile, when you breathe in, what comes in? polluted air? beauty? ease? anxiety? And when you breath out? What comes out?
Breathing is a funny thing. Of all the automatic bodily functions, like sweating, shivering, digesting, it is the one that connects us both inside and out, brings in the outside world, and mixes it with the inside world in an instant. Our food does this too, but not with the magical lightness of less than a moment. In each breath, we are formed whole, complete and without question alive. And then, again, in each breath, we are dissolved, released, absolved and new. In each breath lies your whole life. This is creation at its finest. Breath.
Every cell is breathing. Every pore is breathing. Every hair is breathing. And in each cell, each pore, each hair is vital bit of who you are, a vital, alive, script that is uniquely you. Each day cells die, pores clog, hairs fall out. Each day you are you and then, you are a new you, a transparent fresh skin, blood, face even. So you are you and yet you are the world around you. The air you breath. The food you eat. The action you take that says your knees hurt or you are ready to run. Sometimes it is hard to know who or what you are willing to be on a given day. And sometimes it is hard to know how to plan or behave about the future.
Automatic, life-giving, breathing can also bring life and attention to our experience beyond simple survival. With a simple shift of attention, we can become aware of what we take in, what we give out. The shift of attention that leads us to being with the breath is often called meditation practice. But if that deters you from doing it, I say, why bother to call it anything. You can just bring your attention to your breath, anytime, anywhere. There, I mean there where your breath is happening, there will be all the “information” you need to be in any given moment.
And in this simple shift is everything we need to save ourselves and the world from a pointless, meaningless existence. Breath brings you into undeniably intimate contact with the world around you. The air that you breathe was exhaled by someone else. The air molecules that are now yours, were once someone else. And yours are destined to be shared in the same way. Air connects us all. And through the magic of breathing, it feeds both our uniqueness and our sameness, our oneness and our many.
So, what is our future then? Are we one or are we many? How are we both? When we bring our attention fully and completely to each breath these divisions no longer matter, they simply disappear. We can let go of needing to know who and what we are, and instead, we can simply breathe, simply be. The gift, you could say, of being human. A free gift, you might even say!
Next week more on questions and answers...
Power Down to Power Up!
Our bodies are amazing. They work 24 hours a day. And they agree to make you a top priority always. Always. But like any complex and brilliant system powering down every now and then is crucial for optimal functioning. You know how when your computer just won't cooperate, just won't do what you want, the first advice is to shut it off for a few minutes and restart. Well, when do we restart our bodies? Sleep is the time for repair, restore and recharge for the vital organs, aiding and allowing for detoxification, creative expression and intellectual acuity. But is that a restart? So much is still going on while we are sleeping.
"We re-create, renew and reorganize ourselves through the process of rest….If we know how to rest, the simplest acts can become moments of pure pleasure. Rest is primarily an active process that makes us vital and (re)creative."
Matthew Edlund M.D., The Power of Rest, Why Sleep Alone Is Not Enough
I think we can use our consciousness, our own awareness, to create a "restart", an opportunity to really rest. Sleeping is a form of resting, but waking resting, what Dr. Edlund calls "active resting" is a whole different animal. Something akin to sitting on the beach or walking by the river. Sitting under a tree, watching the grass grow. These moments can be resting. These moments can also be lost through distraction, worry, emotional confusion if we don't know how to rest.
One of the best ways I know to learn to rest is through meditation practice. When we meditate we can let ourselves be and allow ourselves to open to the flow of communication between heart, mind and body. This is a precious and radical act these days. When we learn to just be, learn to open in this way, we can really rest anywhere. Oddly, we often make our meditation practice another thing to do. Instead we could think of it as a way to care for ourselves, a way to appreciate our hard-working bodies and a way to simply be in our world.
In the same way that knowing you will have tea with a friend, meditation practice can become something we look forward to, something that refreshes our energy, realigns our priorities. Our top priority is rarely just breathing, especially because breathing happens without our conscious consent. Usually we have a very conscious, very loaded agenda for a given hour. We want to eat, move, breath, talk, wash dishes, respond to emails, take phone calls. Instead, meditation could be a friendly space with no agenda. When we meditate, we can just breathe.
Our breath connects us with all that is alive in a given moment. We hear, we see, we smell, we are alive. And we can be resting. Rest, awake rest, acts as a way to gather resources for anything else we might do. For every moment that we actually rest, we grow our capacity to be present in our life with vitality and awareness.
One of my favorite discourses on the beauty and power of resting:
Next week, more on breathing, believe it or not…:)
P.S. If you'd like to learn to meditate or would like support with your existing practice, please visit my mentoring page on the Essence Presence website.
Meditating on the hillside behind my house here in North Carolina.
Gap Happy - Finding, Minding and Mining the Gap
We have this phrase – minding the gap. Sometimes, watch the gap. What does this really mean? Pay attention. Attention to what? To the space between the train and the platform if you are riding the subway. To the space between one thought and the next if you are meditating. Or go shopping if you are walking down 9th avenue in New York. Seriously, though, my whole philosophy of health might just rest on this one idea; everything you need to know is happening in the gap.
There are many gaps, though we usually ignore them. Big or small, we are still terribly accustomed to avoiding the gap. We want to know. We want to have prepared the questions, or have the answers. Stepping to the next platform, to the next thought, to the next “doing” is almost automatic. We don't want to feel at a loss, be without something to hold on to. We don’t consider that a moment of “nothing”, a moment of gap, might just be the critical moment for choosing what we do next. Even more critically, if we allowed ourselves to rest in this gap, what would happen?
The gap between knowing and not knowing. The gap between diagnosis and treatment. The gap between treatment and your life. The gap between knowing who you are and finding out who you are now. All of our potential, maybe even all that we could know, seems to lie in this space where nothing and everything is happening. Your choices live in the gap, the choices that power your health.
Finding the gap is easy. Most often, quite literally, the gap finds us. But, can we allow that gap to “entertain” us, stir our curiosity, crack open our hearts. Can we step right into the gap? Can we go even further and "mine" the gap, feel and know these things that will only show themselves when we move into the gap?
There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.
Leonard Cohen
Crack the window, open the door. Take a breath. It is possible that in order to charge forward, in order to take the next moment of life in, the space in front of you is just the breath you need to find your own power and knowing. And if you are ill, facing crisis, or maybe just ending a long day, the gap, the light, will show you how to go forward in a way that is true, a way that is you.
Next week, powering down to power up, how resting actually fuels everything you do!