One from the fall of 2017 for the amazing folks over at Nourishing Storm.

I’ve been working with my breath lately.  Breathwork is powerful.  Without the breath there is no life.  And it is so much like life with its rhythmic draw and release.

As I sat with my breath, following its rise and fall, it offered me a story.  Inhaling, I paused at the top, holding the breath there, holding life within.  Feeling gratitude, feeling full.  Feeling alive.

Trusting I will feel its fullness once again, I let it go.  I let it fall.  I followed it down.  Down into my roots.  I let it all out.  And I sat within my emptiness. And I listened from that stillness.  I was less comfortable at the bottom of the breath.  When can I breath?  I feel so hollow.

I listened for my answer.  It was so quiet at the bottom.  And from this place I heard that small shy voice that brings the world down to its size.  I cannot tell you what it said to me.  It spoke a million words through the silence.  Through the slowing beat of my heart, I listened until I felt at peace with my emptiness.  Until I was ready to accept my own dark hollowness.  Until I learned winter’s lesson of holding that quiet space after each fall, listening and waiting for life to fill me again.

I was ready to inhale.  I was ready to allow my lungs to expand with life, to rise with the truth of fullness I now understood.  My breath held a lesson of self compassion, for all the times I have fallen and all the times I will feel empty again.  Life will take me to its darkest depths over and over yet still I will heed the call of the heights I have yet to reach.   And so I will rise.  Again and again, I will rise.

“There is something moon soaked and dawn flavoured about her. Something kissed by the wild and loved by lightning. She looks like Artemis after a night of storm hunting. She looks like the sun as it rises after kissing the dawn.”  – Nikita Gill