Surrendering into Breath

Quote gifted to me this week by my lovely coach.

"Caminante, no hay camino. Se hace camino al andar. (Traveller, there is no path, The path must be forged as you walk). Anthony Machado

I arrived on this beautiful land. Guided. Trusting in the unseen. That I will meet the people that I need to connect with. That I'm exactly where I need to be. It is a way to give up control. To let go and surrender. Learning to share space with others, learning to give, to love, to connect deeply. I feel full. This life in which I have chosen, this path of the unknown I'm walking, how could I live any other way in this moment? Doubt does hover around time to time, but I reflect on all the beautiful connections and I return to the energy that accompanies surrendering.

I am cultivating flow on this journey. I'm not forcing anything, allowing life to guide me along. To be human is not to control. To control leaves us tight. It squeezes our insides until we can no longer breathe. It happens gradually over time, perhaps from the moment we arrived on the scene, that we aren't even aware that we have stopped breathing. All seems normal because everyone around us has also stopped breathing.

Take a moment, begin from ten and count down. Breathing deep into your belly. Close your eyes if that feels good. This is a practice I've incorporated in my morning meditation practice. Usually at the end of the sit. I do three rounds of this breathing into the belly. The inhale and exhale counts as one cycle. Try it out. It will only take a couple minutes. How do you feel before and after? Did you feel a shift after 1-3 cycles of intentional breathing?

Many have developed a negative association with the word meditation. There are some out there that may speak about these practices in a way that turns you off. But the answer is not to shift away from meditation practices. It is such a vast practice with so many beautiful techniques to heal the current state of the human mind. It's a disservice to write off the whole because of a few, a disservice to yourself and to the collective. But I understand. Why wouldn't you? All the major religions have done their best to banish these techniques that empower us and connect more deeply within ourselves.

Religion has been manipulated by the agendas of a few. What we are left with today is an empty shell. Because we have been convinced into thinking that the divine is outside of us but the buried truth is we are born from source, therefore we are source. The divine is not ‘out there’ it is within each one of us. I recently read a beautiful description of breathing. When we breathe consciously, we breathe our spirits into our bodies. When we develop the awareness and understanding that we can access the divine within us, the power and control of the few transitions to the power of the many. The many who have denounced mainstream religion is because of this feeling of emptiness. At some point in history the religions themselves stopped breathing in the divine.

Why is it that the world has more 'house of gods' in all of human history, yet the human injustices around the world have increased? Shouldn't these institutions be nourishing more justice? Shouldn’t there be less homelessness, less children starving, more safety for women, more evolved masculine consciousness and ways to be nurturing towards this planet that holds us with so much love? Why do we continue and evolve the ways of brokenness? Who benefits from continuous feeding and polluting of the ecosystem? I wonder, who is feeding whom? Is religion feeding capitalism? Or is capitalism feeding religion? My thoughts? They are one and the same. One simply hides under the umbrella of ‘non-profit’.

So here we are. The ones that the mainstream will call kafirs. It is the kafirs who are reviving the soul of the mainstream, through the many modalities of meditation and reviving ancient spiritual practices. They are doing us a favour and with time, the soul will once again reunite with the physical, the human body. We will once again take full cycles of breath with ease and all the illnesses this world faces will dissolve. Illness is a result of slow and steady tightening of our insides. When we breathe deeply together, the rituals will once again reunite with our souls. Then we will witness the life that was meant to be.

"To labor in the world of learning, research, or in the artistic world, one attempts again and again to refine one’s sense of readiness so that the great images or thoughts can approach and be received. The sense of smell includes the sensuality of fragrance, but the dynamic of breathing also takes in the deep world of prayer and meditation, where through the rhythm of the breath you come down into your own primordial level of soul. Through breath meditation, you begin to experience a place within you that is absolutely intimate with the divine ground. Your breathing and the rhythm of your breathing can return you to your ancient belonging, to the house, as Eckhart says, that you have never left, where you always live: the house of spiritual belonging."

O'Donohue, John. Anam Cara