Since returning from the Emerging Futures: Entrepreneurial Women retreat, I’m noticing that I can hardly breathe! From one day to the next, I catch myself holding my breath – time and again – and wonder what that’s all about! Typically, breathing comes easily and effortlessly, bringing with it a sense of the vast Space that I AM for my own evolution. But these last few days, not so!
This new series of moments, strung together like pearls on a string, are separate and yet very much part of the same overall experience. Perhaps as I wonder about it, I’ll do it out loud and discover what else is there for me.
Breath, at the level of dense matter and the physical body, is essential to survival. And yet I also know that breath, itself, is not the Life Force but the pump that allows that Life Force to move freely and immensely through my physical body. Small, tight, tiny breaths = small, tight, tiny flow of Life Force.
My Life Force rides on the crest of the wave of my own breath, making it possible for the ‘energy’ that sources me – body, mind and spirit – to touch every aspect of my being. When I am not ‘in breath’, energy is significantly reduced, as is my sense of being nourished in body, mind and spirit.
I’m noticing that when I hold my breath, it is on the inhale. This leaves my body bracing… pressing against something… vibrating rapidly as if I have to hurry and get through something. Images, thoughts, ideas, sounds wash over me in a tsunami of cascading notions that seem to somehow smash up against all that I know. Other times, I have noticed that I have held my breath on the exhale, leaving my body static and tethered to my physical world… feeling slow and stuck or caught in space and time. No images or sounds; no notions or ideas other than the desire to be still. These days, I am not feeling stuck – I am feeling as if I’m moving at mach speed! Truth be told, maybe I am…. Maybe my body is trying to catch up to the rest of me.
My non-physical ‘being’ is already light years ahead of where my body stands. In these moments, I can feel the matter associated to who I have been and what has been, crumbling at the edges at all Logical Levels. All that I have been and all that is associated to it is moving and shifting and falling apart. Disintegration is already happening. Bifurcation is in flow… and my body is letting me know it is doing so with me and all that I am connected to/with in a physical world.
And so I notice… I stop and take 5 long, slow, deep breaths… and allow myself to relax into the disintegration of my own life. It is no longer who I am but an echo of who I have been – and it’s time for it to morph and transform and become the ‘more’ that I know I already am.
Breathing is good….
And so I inhale more of who I know I am becoming… and exhale more of who I have been. Inhale tomorrow… and exhale yesterday. Inhale potential… and exhale history. Inhale curiosity and exploration and adventure… and exhale yesterday’s successes, outcomes and results.
I live in a world… my world… where in order to become, I must let go of who I was, recognizing that it all co-exists in the now. My body becomes the territory within which this dynamic experience is sensed and embraced and lived.
In this moment, I am reminded of Susan’s comment during EF:EW about the caterpillar to butterfly process: that in the formless mass that briefly lives between no-longer-caterpillar and not-yet-butterfly, there is a pulse. This pulse is the call to become… it is the vibration that invites matter to reform… and it is the call to awaken to the next expression of being. If the caterpillar is unwilling to let go of what it knows, it cannot become what it does not yet know it is. In this mush of who I am today, breath and the space it brings makes way for me to notice and follow the pulse. The pulse is always in the mush – and I am never alone.
Today, I am mush! Glorious, life-enhancing mush, with the potential to awaken and engage the ‘me’ that I do not yet know can be! I’m good with that, and I really do know….
Breathing is good!
This was a (another) good one for me. I read it and was seeing that you’re ‘still human’ and still working-at-it too, and this, concurrently, while you help so many others of us move forward. So a) you’re human (and still with us, not yet white light!) and b) it’s not an either/or thing . . . by that I mean that you (or I) can know what you/I/we are, and we can not know more than the mushy-with-a-pulse feeling about a current ‘state’, and both can exist together . . .
There was more as I read it, but this is what sticks now. Thanks, Louise!