Sometimes I get stuck in a very difficult and uncomfortable moment. My coping mechanisms stop working, or they cause me even more suffering. And I can’t find anything to distract myself from how I’m feeling, and I get scared and even panicked.
It’s not a fun place to be.
The only thing that helps me in these moments is when I remember that there’s something else going on at the very same time, something as real as my pain, right underneath my circumstances and all the other stuff that makes me feel scared and panicked and depressed and ashamed and guilty and resentful and regretful and just plain burned out.
It’s a place I was born with, and a place I can always find comfort from, whenever I’m able to remember it’s here.
It’s that space inside myself where I’m not my behavior or my gender or my experiences or my age or my family or my thoughts or my health or my neurology or where I live or how much money I have or don’t have.
It’s that space where I’m nothing but a living breathing being.
To get there, I just need to sink beneath my upsets...
Until all I have is me and my breath.
I so often take my breath for granted because it’s so simple: all it does is go in when it goes in, and go out when it goes out.
But when I think about it, it’s really the most reliable friend I have. It’s here all time time, after all, giving me my very life.
So I hang out with my breath for a little while, staying by its side as it goes in, and by its side as it goes out, and after a little while, when I return to the world of my circumstances, life feels a little easier, and a little less painful, because I can still feel the reality of who I am underneath my circumstances—a living, breathing being.
-JLK
