The Daily Miracle of Breathing That Connects Us All.
Recently I received news that a very lovely person I know suddenly died a week before Christmas, leaving his family completely devastated at the loss of a loving husband and father.
I also know of someone who was rushed to hospital on Christmas Day with a suspected stroke and as a result of the pandemic we have all noticed an increase in the number of people now suffering with mental health problems, anxiety and uncertainty.
These situations can cause people to feel isolated and alone, their grief, worry and anxiety making them feel separated from the rest of society.
But we are not alone. We are all connected and sometimes it just takes a bit of contemplation and reflection to see that interconnectedness in a different perspective.
The problem is that our society today is all about noise and distraction. People constantly need to be distracted from their life by watching the television, working long hours, engaging in excess and a variety of other external things that are easily available to distract them from themselves and the life they are living as a means of escapism.
Sometimes however, we need to quiet the noise and turn down the static so we can listen to our mind and our bodies and connect with the world in a much more holistic and healthier way.
Now I’ve covered the amazing benefits of meditation on previous podcasts and blog posts but this morning I was listening to a guided meditation episode on one of the apps I use called ‘10 percent happier’ and I’d like to share with you what I heard on that guided meditation in the hope that it will help give you a new perspective on the simple act of breathing and how extraordinary such a simple act can be.
As you breathe just consider the reality of what you are doing.
You are joining nearly 8 billion people and tens of billions of animals engaging in this same process around the world right now.
In addition, there are also approximately 400,000 species of plants breathing with us. Exhaling the oxygen we breathe in and inhaling the carbon dioxide we breathe out.
One life can sometimes seem so separate from everyone else’s and seem so lonely, and yet without this breath connected to all living things on this planet it would end very quickly. We’re never as lonely as it seems.
Consider each breath you take contains more that one septillion molecules in it. That’s more than a billion, billion molecules.
And because each breath diffuses around the world, it takes only about a year for each breath that every human is breathing to scatter all around the earth.
As you are breathing right now, the odds are you’re breathing in five or six molecules of the last breath of Christ, of the breaths that the Buddha exhaled when experiencing enlightenment, of the breaths of every ancestor of yours and every living person, animal and plant that has ever lived on planet earth.
Many people feel very separate, but we are actually all connected.
The app is called 10 percent happier and it is available to download and is definitely worth a listen – https://www.tenpercent.com/