The Breath of My Heart

I wasn’t always able to listen to my heart this way.

I can say that with some confidence, even though looking back at my life can feel, at times, almost impossible.

My memory is composed of fragments. Pieces of me floating within time and space.

The way I feel memory within my own body is something like an old film. A frame. Then another. Some still vivid with color. Others faded.

Pieces spliced together. A space of darkness. A skip. Then back again.

I know I am not alone in this feeling. For many of us, looking back can feel this way.

We try to stitch those pieces together, to give them a sequence the mind can follow. But the space between does not always offer itself to remembering.

I have described these interruptions to some of those closest to me as something almost like small near-death experiences, though I had never come that close to death in the formal sense.

Those are simply the closest words I have found for this feeling.

There was a me. Something happened. And the me who was here afterward was no longer quite the same.

A stop. And then a restart.

At times, it felt as though I had been taken out of the life I knew and then placed back into it again. Carrying new information. Finding myself here, in a body, with a changed relationship to being me.

We might name this a kind of altered state. A break in the ordinary experience of time and space.

We can also understand these fragments partly through the lens of trauma.

I have lived through my share of capital-T traumas and many lowercase-t traumas, beginning quite young.

That psychosocial framework helped me, in my younger life, hold the interruptions, the fragmented feeling, and the spotty memories with compassion.

And now I carry a deep spiritual knowing about those experiences, too.

I have come to understand that what changed me physically and emotionally also changed me psychically and spiritually.

When I go back to locate myself in my smallest self—the self still dependent on the grown world—I recognize how difficult it felt to stay in my body. To listen to this feeling heart. To connect to the breath of life.

When I was young, my life felt like a mythic story I was living inside of, its proportions enormous to that little self.

The ruptures in connection. The sudden, startling outbursts. The ordinary moments that became ravenous monsters. These, too, became part of my narrative.

Even my memories of joy come to me speckled with the unexpected and the shocking.

Feeling the intensity of this fragile, confusing, and fleeting life was more than I could bear.

I became afraid of my own tender heart. Afraid of letting the breath move me. Afraid of what the full-feeling world of body and breath wanted from me.

Life has a way of jump-starting the heart. Of bringing us back into the body, into breath, into feeling.

I know now that, through the many me’s I have been, my heart and its breath have been calling me to release what I have come to depend on for a false sense of security.

Calling me back to love.

The God in my heart

I have come to know intimately that God lives in the heart. Yet for so long, I was afraid to accept that God lived inside of me.

My relationship with God has been complicated.

I grew up in institutions prescribing God, surrounded by stories I was indoctrinated to accept as truth. They felt all too magical, too mythical, too absurd for my practical self—the young self who needed to be practical to organize the chaos.

Although I am such a lover of story and myth now, my young life already felt too tragic, too confining, too archetypal to make room for more story. More myth.

The good and the bad mother. The present and absent father. The archetypes already alive and expressed within the family.

It is a great deal to ask that little self to take in still more story when so much is already being lived.

I wish God had been a safe other for me when I was young. A relationship into which I could bring my confused and weary and curious self.

Instead, God became a story of punishment and fear. One more thing for me to fear.

What a sad thing, when we take something so loving and turn it into something to fear.

Yesterday, in a conversation with a client, I found myself saying that when the heart awakens us deeply, there is an opportunity to surrender and say: Have your way with me.

Even as I said it, I could feel how much surrender those words ask of us.

Myself included.

There is something vulnerable about allowing the heart to become an orienting point.

We begin to listen before we know where that listening will lead.

We may feel called toward something whose full shape we cannot yet see. We may discover that the life we have arranged around certainty needs room for something still becoming.

Let yourself become the pebble

This morning, I was looking down at a walkway, at the small pebbles embedded in the concrete. Beautiful little pieces of stone, each contributing to the ground beneath my feet.

I felt an invitation: Let yourself become the pebble.

Each small stone was part of a larger foundation. Its presence helped reinforce the ground. I wondered what it would mean to understand my own place that way: to participate in a design larger than the part I can see.

I often want the whole picture. I want to know where a creation is going, what it will become, whether I am hearing the call clearly.

Yet standing there, looking down, I felt something settle. There was already a place for the small stone. I could offer my part while the larger design continued to emerge.

For me, this is one of the ways the God in my heart speaks through the ordinary.

Something catches my attention, and listening becomes possible.

Listening through heart and breath

The heart and the breath have become central to that listening.

I experience the heart as a powerful epicenter of spirit within this physical body, with a life that feels larger than the body can contain.

Breath is movement, animation, participation.

As I bring my awareness into the heart and become immersed in its breath, I feel an opening.

An aperture through which something larger than myself can enter my awareness.

Sometimes what comes through is a feeling. Sometimes an image, a few words, a desire to paint. Sometimes it is a tenderness that asks me to stay close and listen longer.

This is why I feel called to create opportunities for others to journey into the heart with me.

As a doula of the heart, I have the honor of accompanying, listening, and learning alongside those who come.

Each person brings a life, a rhythm, a way of receiving. We discover what becomes possible in that shared attention.

Heart Breath is one of the vehicles through which this calling takes form.

And the calling continues to challenge my attachment to the form.

Almost as soon as I hear an invitation to create, I hear another reminder: Let this creation have its life. Allow it to change.

Allow it to change you too.

There is always more to sing

Heart Breath has me remember singing. For a long time, I spent my days singing, learning to use my voice as an instrument. I became familiar with how air moves through my instrument and a melody becomes audible.

There are mechanics, movement, vibration—and there is the spirit with which we sing.

The heart’s song sounds different for everyone.

We would hardly expect to compose one song and sing only that song for the rest of our lives.

We would continue tending the instrument.

Continue showing up. Continue listening for what wants to be created.

There is always more to sing.

I want to remember this when I become attached to a particular offering, a particular expression, a particular understanding of who I am.

I can love what I have created and allow the next song to come.

When I tune into the breath of my heart, I want to sing. I want to write. I want to paint. I want to fly.

I want to inspire because I am inspired.

I am in the spirit of my heart.

And I am still learning how to let that spirit move me.

Still meeting the part of me that wants assurance before it opens. Still learning how to listen with tenderness to the fear and make room for the call.

Have your way with me.

Today, those words feel like an opening I can practice, one breath at a time.

I can tend the instrument. I can offer my small stone to the ground.

I can listen for the next song.

An invitation

If you feel called to listen to the breath of your own heart, I would be honored to journey with you.

Join me in Heart Breath. We’ll come together to breathe, to listen, and to make room for the song that wants to move through you.