Breathing Through: a way to meet bad news
How do we stay open to the essential function of feeling our pain for the world (or the person next to us, or ourselves), when it feels like it might break us?
Or might make us feel helpless?
Or might separate us?
I recorded this video yesterday to post on Instagram, for anyone who, like me, is feeling pain about the news right now, and might be scrolling social media, feeling yanked rapidly between the heart-wrenching, the trivial, the terrifying, the hilarious, and so on, and on, and on.
Here's the same post for you:
In the past 90 seconds, have you touched heartbreak, humor, fear, disgust, and judgment? Maybe more than once each? Scrolling can be so strange. So disorienting.
I find it disorients me from this key thing, this piece that may just be essential to a life-sustaining human society:
Feeling my pain for the world.
Letting my pain be part of what Joanna Macy describes as an "intact feedback loop."
Pain tells us to take our hand off a hot stove. Good feedback.
Pain also tells us to act to protect, to heal, to seek justice, to not just go on with business as usual. Good feedback.
Unless we don't feel it.
And among the reasons we don't feel it are that we're afraid of being overwhelmed, or feeling helpless, or experiencing separation. This practice might help.
When you want to slow down for 8 minutes, here's a meditation for you called Breathing Through. I find it beautiful and helpful, and so have the people I've practiced it with.
If now's not the moment, save this post for when you want it.