Breathe the Pain

When pains arrives, breathe. Open the pores of your life, and allow the lungs of your soul a slow inhale. Then exhale.

Without breath, we stop. Our heart stops. Like our body, our soul ceases to grow with the unwanted medicine of experience. Our hearts become small. Our hearts fears pain, although pain is not its worthy fear. Nor is it pain that we should fear; it is the knowledge of an unlived life. The unlived life is the Collection of experiences we deny ourselves. These collection of experiences carry with them the risks of pain, risks too large for our small hearts to take. We turn them away. We also turn away the joys and undreamable possibilities they bring. We choose instead to live in the state of the middle. We choose not to know pain. And when we choose not to know pain, we also mute the joys available to us. This is when we do not breathe pain. The room of our lives turns stale from the stagnant air; a bell jar which keeps the air locked in, vacuum of self-preservation so we think, while that which has life is really dying.

Instead of breathing, we hold the pain as clutching our necks. Our eyeballs bulging from lack of air, peers at others with judgment and scrutiny. Instead of breathing, we paper the pain with pleasures and busyness and knowledge; pushing our hearts down and down, until we no longer recognize ourselves. Shielding but never holding together, a wet heap of paper mache. We become heavy.

Until we breathe the pain, we deny ourselves life-giving air. To breathe pain is to allow it to come into the body. Shallow, rushed, short, heaving, deep. As much as our bodies will take in that breath, breathe pain in. Then breathe pain out. And again, and again.

This is how to grow a heart and soul.