BEING WITH CHANGE – a conversation with Valerie Galvin and Alisa Kort
We are talking about the cataclysmic change that is happening in our world, and how so many people are facing their own earth-shattering events, in the midst of it all. COVID 19 and the long overdue recognition of our collective and individual responsibility to dismantle systemic racism; illness, death, and economic uncertainty — these changes are asking us to examine how we have perceived the world and our place in it.
How do we support all this?
During our conversation, we asked ourselves: how does Breathexperience help us to navigate this new landscape?
We’re dealing, all of us, with change we don’t want, and also, perhaps, change we do want.
What could be possible if we started with meeting ourselves as we are and the world as it is? What creative responses might we be capable of?
Our years of teaching and practicing Breathexperience have taught both of us that our breath gives us the capacity to be with change… not with a view to getting it over with, to a palatable end, but to participate in the process of that change, and to not know what happens next.
So often though, we humans don’t give ourselves the space to participate in that process. Instead, we react. Fear… then jumping into action, or worrying. We obsess and ask ourselves, “How do I solve this problem? How do I avoid the pain of it? How do I get rid of the anxiety? What will I do when the worst thing happens?”
These are all future projections that we have no control over.
Instead, we could ask:
What can I offer myself right now?
How can I be in the midst of this situation, and not lose myself in the fear and pain?
These feelings of fear, pain, anxiety, are noisy. They dominate our experience. Can we ask ourselves: what is also true in those moments?
Somewhere within us there are also other things happening, right alongside. There is ease, trust, power, and the capacity to respond creatively.
All these other resources become available when we connect to our breath and notice the simple sensation of the movement of the breath that is. In doing this, we find that It is always there. And so we participate in life … the messiness, the unraveling, the joy, and the possibility … one breath at a time.
We allow.
We receive moments of ease and realize that even in the worst moments… it is there too; living in our allowed breath.
Breath is not another thing we ‘do’. It is a part of us we learn to include and listen to. It is always there, and when we choose to notice that simple sensation of the movement of our breath, we receive time, hope, generosity, substance… support from deeply within ourselves… to be with what is.
Alisa and Valerie are two of the four co-directors of Breathexperience Canada.