Would you like to join me in a practice? 

Inhale, and as the breath fills your lungs imagine them expanding to capacity.

Then, with your lungs fully expanded, imagine your breath overflowing as you exhale. Pause for a moment before your next inhalation.  If this felt satisfying, do it a few more times. 

I'm continually in awe of how our bodies show us what is true. In one simple breath, we can experience in an embodied way, birth, maturation, decline, and death. The rhythm of this pattern sustains us. Indeed, it sustains all of life. 

The waxing and waning of the moon, flooding and ebbing of the tides, blossoming and decaying of the fruit, and so forth are a kind of breath. In and out, expansion and contraction, becoming and releasing. 

From a zoomed-out perspective, there's impartiality to the process. The cycle simply is. Tracking this dance orients us. There's something comforting about recognizing the season of a thing. 

Where things get tricky, however, is not trusting this process in our own lives. The colonized world privileges continual growth, expansion and exertion. We are meant to always have an answer to the question: "What do you do?" And even when that is not our value system, we worry when it's not clear -- when our lives are in the space between inhalations.

Take another breath with me and notice, what does your body already know how to do in the space between becoming? How does it navigate the exhale? The empty pause? 

If we are in a time of exhale, our world is falling away -- relationships, jobs, and things we care about. But this slipping away, as difficult as it is, is not a problem. It is a reminder that you and your life are part of a natural cycle. As with all of life's stages, there's wisdom here. 

A time of exhale is a time of reflection. It is a time of learning that sometimes the hardest thing to do is not do. We can notice, where am I still trying to keep things "under control?" Where am I still holding my breath? What would it mean to release? 

At the bottom of the exhale, when there is nothing, we panic. There has been a death. We question, who am I? But there is a wisdom here too that's awaiting recognition. 

Our bodies remind us how to be with this emptiness. 

When we are at the bottom and there is nothing, this is not the time to make a plan. "Fix" our lives. It is not that we have made a terrible mistake. 

Rather, we can know, this silence is necessary. It is an essential space of pause. In this potency "me" and "mine" dissolve into the hum and rhythm of that which is much larger. Our ability to feel interwoven with this greater container is waiting to deliver us to a sense of ease. Like the dark moon vanished into a sea of stars, can we reside without agenda? Rest?  

Because we've observed how a wave gathers from an expanse of ocean and how the breath builds at the bottom of the exhale, from nothing there is always something.  We will begin again.