When life takes your breath away, surrender. When life makes you surrender, find your breath. Close your eyes. Breathe in deeply. Let peace find its way through your veins by fueling it with oxygen. Let the mind wander wherever it wants to go. What is true will find its way up through layers of the not so true. Playfully jump from thought to thought as if they were pebbles in a stream, while remembering you are both the pebbles and the stream. And the observer of both.
Breathe in even further. Be the observer. Go up, up, up, until you can gaze down just far enough to recognize yourself dancing a complex choreography on the slippery floors of this majestic but inexplicably simple dome of Life. Hold your breath. Hold that eternal space for just a moment. Embrace the full emptiness of it. There is nothing to fear. You are here, in the center of it. You are safe. You are whole.
Breathe out everything that you are not, you no longer are or no longer want to hold on to. Let it all go in one long, all-encompassing, liberating, sigh. What is left is everything: you, here, now. Open your eyes.
The deeper and longer you breathe, the calmer the world will become. No matter how hopeless, endless, terrifying, or heartbreaking a situation is, if you can manage to breathe through it, you will be okay.
Whatever it is that made you forget to breathe, it will pass. And you will remain, strong and calm, in the eye of the storm.
#whenimnotthereimhere
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