Are You Breathing, Honey?
My Mama Ruth used to ask me this question a lot and honestly, it annoyed me. It annoyed me because of course she was right, I wasn’t breathing, but also because it meant that I had to deal with my shit. Sometimes I just wanted to hide out in my non-breathing state so that I could numb myself to whatever unpleasant situation happened to be occurring for me in that moment. I mean this literally. Go ahead and hold your breath and you’ll see what I mean. Holding your breath numbs you both physically and emotionally, but you can’t continue to hold your breath forever. Eventually you will have to breathe, and when you do, you will find yourself right back in your body. And when you arrive back in your body your feelings will still be there, because here’s the truth about the things we don’t want to look at: they tend to stick around. They hang out, waiting for you to acknowledge them, and they have a lot of patience. They will wait for you to do your whole avoidance thing—they don’t mind. I
