The OGT Daily #59 Just Breathing

I have to remember the reason I started this blog all those many years ago on a snowy Jan day in 2017.  It was because I remembered to be grateful that I was just breathing even though the world as we thought we knew it had crashed down around us in the firestorm and mayhem of what was the first Trump administration. Well now, eight years later, the firestorm has escalated and burning ever wilder out of control just like the Palisade fire of Jan and February.

It is by design that we now feel so breathless, helpless, confused and assaulted.  This was exactly the plan of Project 2025 and the far right.  We are meant to feel so whiplashed that we just want to hide and sit frozen doom scrolling on our phones. The victims of our own complicity.  

But we don't have to give into the freeze. It's perhaps easy for me to say this but if we can each slow down enough to remember our breath, spend small moments of just being present with that, we can change.  Jon Kabat-Zinn reminds us with his Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction model that the breath is never in the fast or future but in the present moment. 

If we sit with that and be with our breath, clearing the brain of anything else, we can become clearer, more focused, more in tune to realities. We can also become restored enough to choose one small thing (perhaps one good thing!) to fight back.  Yesterday I saw the list of activities from a local political group. Several actions took place at Tesla show rooms protesting.  Others called for making phone calls to your elected officials and letting them know how these rapid fire executive orders are affecting you and your love ones.

Maybe its donating to your local public radio because you know they are going to be a target for shut down. Once free and member sponsored radio is gone then society is in real trouble.

So find your breath, thank your body for it, ground yourself, take some moments of self care and to center and then decide in what small way are you going to fight back?  The substack below from Micah L. Sifray is inspiring. 

https://theconnector.substack.com/p/the-defiance-this-time?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Are you grateful for your breath today?