Inhale and Exhale

You are not your story, you are the witness, the observer, the awareness of this story.

We are not this body, this mind, these feelings. We are that which experiences and has awareness of these feelings. Awareness is like a lens through which life passes.

Life is the inhale and the exhale. It is the contraction and the expansion from the lightness at birth, inhaling and gathering the stories, the memories, the roles, the identities, the body, the wounds, the pain, and suffering, and all things “self”.  We inhale the fullness and heaviness of life until it gets too heavy. Life becomes so full of our identity, form and the weight of the life we’ve created.

Sooner or later, we get to a tipping point, an awakening, a shift or crisis: that pause or transition between the inhale and the exhale.

That tiny point of transition, that tiny pause between the inhale and the exhale is the turning point of awareness in our lives. It is often accompanied by the dark night of the soul. There is often some point at which life becomes too heavy and too full, and we have no choice but to start exhaling all of the burdens, our story, these roles and identities that we gathered, created and held on to for so long.

Then we begin to exhale. Everyone is breathing at their own pace.  For some of us, our inhale is longer, and for others the exhale is relatively longer. The exhale is the lightening. The exhale is the release. The exhale is the letting go of everything we thought we were and that we were “supposed to be” as we become less of the self.

We become less of the self and identity that we spend the first half of our lives creating, developing, and clinging to. We get closer to realizing that we were none of those things after all. We become aware that we are the witness of the story. We are observing, and it's not just us as individuals. We become more aware of our oneness and connection.

As we exhale and let go of our identities that keep us separate and special and different from each other, we realize that none of those things are “us”, and we are all more connected than we ever knew. We had forgotten the divine truth that lies within. Life is the remembering. The closer we get to death and to merging back with all that is, the more we awaken to our connection to all that is.