Breathe Through the Hard Part

 


During the early days of my knee replacement recovery, physical therapy was not exactly gentle. One of the most difficult things they did was push my knee toward my rear end to help me get more bend. I've written about this before. It was terribly painful and at times, it brought me to tears. Before the therapist pushed, she would say, “Take a deep breath in, and let it out when I push.”

Did it help? A little.

Eventually, thank goodness, we moved on from that medieval torture and on to other exercises.

But I thought about that today in yoga.

So often in yoga, exercise, and even life, we are reminded to exhale through the hard part. We breathe out when we stretch, when we lift, when we move through discomfort, when we are trying not to tense up and fight the moment.

And I realized… we are taught this long before yoga.

During labor and delivery, woman are coached to breathe. Inhale, exhale. Stay with the breath, move through the pain one breath at a time. It is not about removing the intensity. It is about getting through it.

And then I thought about another time in my life when breathing became something more.

When I lost my job, my mantra became simple:

Breathe in. Breathe out. Move on.

These are words I first heard in a song by Jimmy Buffett, and ones that stayed with me when I needed them most. I actually have these words framed in my kitchen.

An exhale doesn’t take the hard thing away. It doesn’t make the pain disappear and it doesn’t mean we suddenly feel calm and graceful. It does give the body a message.

You can get through this.

You can soften a little.

You do not have to hold your breath through every difficult thing.

Maybe that is true beyond yoga and physical therapy too.

Sometimes we cannot change what is happening. We cannot rush the healing. We cannot make the difficult part easier just because we want it to be.

But we can breathe.

We can exhale.

We can remind ourselves that even in the hard part, we are still moving through it.

 Here is a video of the song -  


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Mother’s Legacy: Remembering My Mother This Mother’s Day

Image
  Today, while sorting through old photographs and yellowed newspaper clippings, I came across my mother’s obituary. She has been gone for 22 years and yet, somehow, I still feel her presence. Obviously not in a way you can touch or see, but in the guidance that still appears when I need it most. It's in the lessons she taught without ever sitting us down for a formal lecture. It’s in the love that never really leaves us, even after someone is gone. Her obituary described her simply as a “homemaker.” Just one word. But anyone who has ever truly known a mother or grandmother understands that the word homemaker barely scratches the surface. Before marrying my father, my mother had an excellent career in publishing. She was intelligent, capable, organized, and professional long before those qualities were ever recognized in an obituary. Like many women of her generation, she stepped away from one career and unknowingly began another, one that would shape an entire family for...
Read more

When Connection Isn't Immediate

Image
  A place to sit with the day  This morning, I wrote about my yoga intention of being brave and taking a step forward.  Later in the day, I was reminded that sometimes that step doesn’t lead to where we expect.  There are moments in life when we reach out sincerely, simply hoping for connection and sometimes, nothing comes back right away. There’s a pause, a space that can feel larger than it really is.  In that space, it’s easy to start questioning ourselves.  Did I say the wrong thing? Was the timing off? Should I have done things differently? Our minds can play tricks on us and fill in the blanks far too quickly. But perhaps that space is not ours to carry. Perhaps it just is what it is. A moment that didn’t align. A response that didn’t come. A reminder that it’s not a reflection of our worth, but a reflection of timing, circumstance, or where someone else may be in their own life. So we remind ourselves that we can be kind, respectful, ...
Read more

Still Me

Image
  Yesterday I found myself thinking about the ten year old girl I used to be. Today my thoughts moved forward again into another stage of life and what love has meant along the way. It’s funny how our minds sometimes wander back to earlier chapters of our lives. Moments when everything felt new and full of possibility. Like springtime. There is a kind of ache or yearning that can come with those memories, and for the longest time I couldn’t quite name it. Maybe it is my age now but I think I figured it out. Sometimes the yearning we feel when we look back at earlier moments in our lives isn’t about another person at all. It’s about who we were when we were living in that moment. It’s about missing the version of ourselves who lived there. There was an innocence and openness in that time. A belief in possibilities that felt natural and unguarded. So it isn't always about missing another person. For me it's missing the young woman who believed so fully in what life and love mig...
Read more