Exhale
“Your inhale is the precursor to all the power in your exhale: pleasure, creativity,
adventure.
We hold our breath for safety: in fear, anticipation, uncertainty.
Let your exhale reign, otherwise you’re stuck living on pause whilst your adventure awaits.”
When were you last truly scared?
If I were to suddenly run at you at speed a few interesting things would happen in an instant.
Your body has all the answers it needs. It’s pretty damn amazing. The crucial question is: what questions are you asking it?
If I were to suddenly run at you at speed the interesting things that would happen would be the same things regardless of whether you were a small elderly lady who likes the sea when it’s calm, or a 250lb MMA fighter who is exhilarated when things get blown up.
This is because it’s the suddenness that creates the same outcomes. Sure, the elderly lady is likely to end up on the floor, and displeased. And the MMA fighter might automatically contract his core muscles just before impact to receive the blow with more control, and I might just bounce off him and hurt myself more than I hurt him. But it’s what happens just before those moments that holds the same answers for us all.
Because everyone initially holds their breath when scared. And that’s useful. It’s an essential safety mechanism. It protects our internal organs if they’re about to receive pressure; it raises our awareness for uncertainty and thus potential threat; it sends life-saving messages to our brain telling it to brace for impact; and it prepares our body for either the unknown, or the certainty of danger, or both.
Now I’ve never been chased by a tiger, or pursued by molten lava, or attacked by a neighbouring tribe with sophisticated hand-carved weapons. But I hold my breath like I experienced them all yesterday. Relative to the short history of mankind, I did. Because my ancestors did. Because in the thickness of my blood, the history of my brain, and the depths of the tissue in my body – I have lived these experiences. My body remembers, even though I don’t.
I’ve been genuinely scared 3 times in the last week. I was working at my desk from the safety of my home when the sun was shining, and as birds passed my window a sudden shadow ran over my feet and I screamed. Because, obviously, it could have been a money spider, or a mouse. And they can be deadly, in Hackney. Well that’s what my body told me anyway. So I jumped up from my desk and screamed like Christopher Lee had suddenly appeared from my fridge, blood dripping from his fangs.
A couple of days after that, I opened a kitchen cupboard and my bottle of organic agave nectar fell out and hit the kitchen top. The noise was loud and unexpected. And that could have killed me. At least that’s what my body said. Because I jumped back and gasped like I’d been speared through the gut by a Samurai who’d been hiding behind my premium agave all night, perched in my cupboard and ready to prance.
A day after that I saw someone in a movie watching The Shining. I wasn’t watching The Shining – but I was watching someone momentarily watching The Shining. The twins appear, and so I screamed and pulled the cushion over my face whilst trying to press the pause button with my eyes closed. Because fictional children in a movie, being watched by a fictional character in another movie, can kill me. Or so my body thought, because my heart started to race like Jack Torrance had just put the sledgehammer through my front door in that same moment.
There’s a chance that I’m a sensitive soul. There’s a chance that I watched too much Kubrick when I was far too young. There’s a chance that I’m carrying a lot of trauma, burden, stress and anxiety from decades prior whilst handling an impossible family situation whilst also living through a pandemic.
So when I get scared, I hold my breath all too easily. But I’ve gotten a bit too good at that lately. Do you find yourself doing that more often? Do you sometimes feel like you’re in crisis mode for the entire duration of the day? Or maybe even the week? When we extend our stay in crisis, we begin to settle into the management of fear, rather than naturally shift to the freedom from fear. Then this starts to happen:
“We start to ask ourselves misdirected questions that can enable our body to take on more, to carry more, suffer more, manage more, and complain less.
Your body doesn’t want these answers, but if that’s all you’re asking, then that’s what you’ll get.”
When still in a pandemic a year later, or an abusive relationship that deals out daily bruises, or a high-intensity job that demands your underpaid overtime everyday, it becomes easier to put all our energy into surviving the immediate duration and we can forget to plan for, or hope for, or even to simply visualise a better tomorrow just before we fall asleep.
Eventually, when others make suggestion for a more optimistic outlook in order to pull ourselves out from our darkness, we’re too tired, too deflated and can’t see any light or purpose to even trying. Plus, we’ve got this holding-our-breath thing down and that feels like an achievement at a time of continued disappointment and uncertainty.
I can do all my housework, complete most of my day’s urgent tasks, put out multiple fires and still be smiling before midday without even making time to brush my teeth or have breakfast. But if that’s become my MO, it’s difficult to then take pride and celebration in self-care and self-love. Or self-anything – because it’s no longer about me. It’s about fighting, surviving, striving. It’s about settling into how much we can do whilst also holding our breath. And then telling people about it as if running on empty should be worn as a badge of honour.
When we inhale, it serves a purpose.
The inhale is the precursor to all the magic and power and greatness that can be revealled in our exhale. In the exhale you find your pleasure, your creativity, tension release, joy, trust, connection, you find your sense of adventure. You find the reminders of your reasons to live that got too easily left behind when you were in crisis.
When we hold our breath for safety, we give power to everything that also stops us from living when we do it for too long or too frequently and leave the exhale behind as an afterthought. When we hold our breath we encourage fear, anticipation, and all the uncertainty that comes with it and gets stuck there, quietly waiting for change.
When we allow ourselves to exhale in full, that’s where all the ancestral greatness comes through. That’s when we start to ask better questions of ourselves. It was on the exhale that the ancient-me saw that cave to hide from that tiger, and live another day. It was on the exhale that my brain kicked in and reminded me I can’t outrun magma, but I can climb and catch my breath in order to think up a better strategy than just run with my arms flailing. It was on the exhale that I found the courage to pivot, fight back, protect, and progress forward rather than just cower and give in.
If we get too comfortable holding our breath, we find ourselves stuck living on pause whilst the adventure of our life awaits us in the background, wondering why we don’t just exhale and take that first step. You’ll never be making that final step to precisely what you want if you don’t at least make the first move in the right direction. And that first move just requires you to exhale.
That’s when you get to ask better questions.
Why am I doing this? Why do I keep repeating this debilitating behaviour? Why am I running away when I need to turn and confront? Why am I fighting something I can’t possibly overcome? What I do want more of? What can I do about that today, with small, gentle steps? These questions present themselves on the exhale.
When we hold our breath, waiting for something better, waiting for change, waiting for that investment to pay off, waiting for permission, we can often find our opportunities, and sometimes life, has passed us by in that waiting period.
Exhaling doesn’t have all the answers. But it will bring you to them. Your body already has all the answers it needs. And all the clarity you’ve been waiting for can be found in your exhale. It’s time to stop holding back. Your adventure awaits.
Exhale.