Op/Ed: Be Where You Can Breathe

If you can’t breathe in a shape, you don’t own that shape. Think about the times that you’ve pushed your limits- like that one-fell-swoop-trip with the groceries from the car to the house.

It doesn’t matter how heavy it is, you’ve just got to get from point A to point B without a bag tearing or your circulation getting cut off for too long. So you queue up to 4 bags on each arm and try to juggle the dry goods that weren’t bagged, key poised in-hand for when you get to the door. Your posture, your pace, and your awareness don’t matter- it’s you, these groceries, and the satisfaction of one trip.

Each day, we are tasked with the choice between “everything all at once” and “one thing at a time”. Because of our cultural conditioning, it’s easily and often “everything all at once” that wins out. This can look different from person to person based on their capacity for action, but it manifests very similarly amongst us nonetheless.

Our lives our a series of opportunities to learn new ways of being, determine if they’re useful for our intended outcomes and make decisions based on that. When, though, we get snagged by “everything all at once”, we can see an infinite number of opportunities as daunting and impossible. This can make us freeze, leaving us further from our intended outcomes than we could have been had we made the definitive choices that led us to be where we could breathe. I’ve had the privilege of getting to coach people into adopting this strategy their way.

You can’t breathe in a shape that you hardly know, that you haven’t yet conditioned in your body, or that doesn’t match with the purpose of your training. The fall out from doing everything all at once in movement practice can end up with tissue tears, endurance breakdowns, and emotional burn out. For sustainable practice, you, instead, are taught to break tasks down to the minutiae each time you move in order to get the skill in the body.

This type of “all at once” pattern is present in all aspects of our personal life whether we can identify it or not, especially if we categorize ourselves as “Type A”. I can attest, having spent the most of my adolescent and adult life in active pursuit of the opposite of “being where I could breathe”. I wanted everything to come to fruition all at once and the disappointment of not having that go my way facilitated repeat patterns of self destruction.

In our hustle culture, this myth of “you can have it all” is distorted to encourage us to “actively seek it all, all of the time”. It’s celebrated as ambition and drive, but it can feel like being trapped and unable to breathe. My lens has always been the latter, so it’s novel to come to a place where this no longer is the case. Arriving at “maybe not all, and certainly not all at once” feels like seeing for the first time. So that’s why I’m writing about it.

With behavior change, we go ahead and make a big long list of everything we should be doing to improve ourselves to become the version of ourselves that we expect. This, while well intentioned, is like stacking our plates at the buffet without thinking of the consequences of over-indulgence. Our eyes are bigger than our stomachs, our expectations are larger than our realistic capacity. We end up stuffed, semi-queasy, and ultimately over-satisfied which (IMO) is the same as dissatisfied.

These days, I struggle most with helping the humans I connect with see very acutely how much breathing room they’ve limited, and how unreasonable their expectations of themselves are. When you think about the things that bum you out, cause you stress, or deplete your energy, how do you actually take action? Do you keep grinding the groove til it’s carved out, or do you pivot with grace? I can only speak from the experiences I get to have each day, but it’s abundantly clear that we’ve come to accept something closer to mediocrity for ourselves masked as ambition. We sacrifice so much outwardly with low to no regard for the ways that sacrifice leaves us underserved.

When our cup is empty, we do not have enough to pour out. We become a sieve with energy running through us so quickly we hardly have a chance to enjoy it’s radiance.