Breathing For The World

Mostly I’m breathing for myself. But sometimes it feels like the world could use a breath. Things feel tight, the suffering in the room or on the planet seems palpable, and I wonder if I can help.

I wonder if I can help by breathing in for everyone, taking in the intensity, the hardship, the suffering, as if they’re mine. As if all suffering is mine – and ours. And then breathing out peace in place of the suffering. Breathing in sorrow and breathing out peace, over and over again.

I wonder what would happen if everyone did that. Would anything change? Maybe. Maybe everything would change, and, as the poet Juan Jimenez once wrote, we’d be sitting in the middle of our new life.