Return to Your Breath

I hear a thousand teachers calling to me: Return to Your Breath. I hear it from the wind in the trees, from the ocean waves on the beach.

Return to your breath.

We've heard some version of this in a thousand different rooms, a thousand different tongues, and somehow it never gets old, because breath never gets old. It's the one thing that's been with us since before we had a name for anything else.

Return to your breath.

Return to your presence. Why start with the breath? Starting with the breath is the most prominent access point to presence. Do you ever notice when you seem to spinning out with anxiety or stress, coming back to a simple breath, usually in a sigh or a tiresome exhale.

Return to your breath.

Return to your self.

This isn't an instruction. It's more like an echo we keep hearing, one that was already there before we started listening for it. The wind knows it. The ocean knows it. Some quiet, wordless part of us already knows it too, because it is us. Everything we do, we do with our breath.

Return to your breath.

It's a mantra when we need to come back to presence. It's a call to action when we've drifted too far into our heads. And more than either of those, it's relief, immediate, available, free, the moment we remember it's there.

Return to your breath.

This is a way of being.