Breathing into your hungry soul
Breathing into your Hungry Soul
Colleen Proulx
December 28, 2023
Life can be overwhelming. It’s almost simple to describe just how overwhelming it can be. Of course, no human is fully exempt from feeling the overwhelm of emotion, energy, or interactions… It's the human condition. Suffering exists, whether it be in your own struggles, your acknowledgement of another’s struggle, or the experience of both… That you might be experiencing suffering yourself while acknowledging another’s suffering, too. It’s both, your own struggle, and that of those who you love & care about, contributing to the overwhelm of feeling, of energy, of being.
This overwhelm of suffering can be paralyzing, depressing, and depleting. I like to think that the recognition of your suffering among the collective, how suffering affects your day-to-day functioning, and your desire to move beyond suffering, is enough to start the process of moving through it.
Maybe you’ve acknowledged “everything” that is causing resistance against your effortless flow, and you still feel stuck. Maybe you’ve connected with trusted teachers, friends, loved ones, mentors, or health care professionals who empathetically offer you support, and you still feel stuck in the thick of it.
I believe this is when you really become your own teacher… And if you don’t know what to do next, begin by taking at least one realllllly deep breath.
Keep repeating this step, that one deep breath, until you feel even the tiniest bit better. This is easier said than done… and the good thing is you can infinitely repeat this step without creating more suffering to yourself or anyone around you.
You might have to let yourself fully feel into all that you resist, and all thoughts associated, before you surrender to it— You might have to cry, yell, talk in therapy, write about it, or even sit with it. Maybe you need to cleanse your physical form with a workout, yoga, a shower, or in meditative stillness. Maybe you feel drawn to re-organizing your physical space, your calendar, or participating in experiences that give you the illusion of control. By allowing yourself full exploration of your feelings, you are intuitively training the mind to surrender to the idea that you can control what you feel, and start exploring the experience of feeling the full range of your emotional being.
Whether you manage to focus simply on breathing, or spend time exploring what may create resistance to your flow, commit to feeling throughout the process. Commit to really feeling until what you’re noticing brings you into focus on that one deep breath. Notice how surrendering your illusion of control helps you to find a more effortless focus on breath.
These next steps can appear tricky at first because although you cannot control your feelings, nor your experiences, or stop suffering from happening, you can actively choose how you react, or rather, respond to those feelings, experiences, and influxes of suffering. The edges of resistance and the breadth of your suffering will continue to become clearer. Rather than turning away, the next step is to trust the inner work you’ve been relishing in, and keep going in deeper, keep trusting your intuition. Without listening for anything in particular, notice what the breath is telling you. There are no wrong answers.
If you made it this far, likely you’re listening with more patience. Perhaps you notice you’re hungry for more clarity, peace, truth. What else?
Food? Or is it water? Or is it a hunger to feel a certain way, to receive a certain answer or message, to create, to explore, to be?
We all have a hunger (Florence & the Machine has a really good song about it). What’s your hunger calling you toward?
Perhaps, the hunger is calling you so far beyond what you have grown comfortable with. These hungry, expansive dispositions might be muted by the cyclical voices in your head telling you “it’s not worth it”… “don’t waste time trying because those goals will never be achieved”… or, “you’ll never be capable of manifesting your dreams”. These default-mode ways of thinking exist because based on past experiences, your nervous system is trying to protect you from any changes that risk your current way of being. Avoid letting all the inner work you’ve embarked on to cultivate peaceful being be taken away by the suffering and resistance from your past. Allow and train your default-mode network to become an active listener of your intuitive voice that was once hushed by the deafening silence or screams of suffering.
We all have a hunger. In order to explore the hunger, you have to be with it when it comes to you. You’ll know. Allow yourself freedom to be in it, openly observe it with all of your senses, and learn to trust it. If we all had the same hunger at exactly the same time, we’d starve humanity, and we’d starve our Self a life worth-living… the experiences of each being’s unique gifts.
So that hunger…
What’s it calling you to lean into? What’s it calling you to become, learn, discover, share, or explore?
Breathe with it. Be with it. After all, it is yours.
