Pause and Catch Your Breath

Welcome to this conversation

Better than Compromise - Episode 2: Pause and Catch Your Breath A contentious, volatile election happened this week. Whether you were on the winning side, the losing side, or somewhere in the middle it is important to pause, take a breath, and remember that it is not about winning or losing. We will use this week to ground and settle ourselves, lift our eyes to the bigger picture of what we are all part of, and prepare for the work ahead of us; an essential step to discovering Better Than Compromise. Thanks for breathing!

Pause and Catch Your Breath

This week was a major peak in a long, long election cycle overlaid by the pandemic and the eruption of action around racial injustice after George Floyd’s murder. How are you? 

We’ve chosen to build a pause into Better Than Compromise to catch our breath and work on grounding and centering so that we can be ready for the work that awaits us.

Something to consider: 

Greg said that when he hasn’t been able to calm and quiet his own soul first he finds that his interactions with others are often unhelpful, frustrating and even hurtful. Does that match your experience? Why do you think it is? Can you recall particular experiences?

Valerie Kaur’s concept of revolutionary love being a sweet labor (LISTEN to Melissa Lock’s podcast from Aug 14, 2020) in which we breathe and push is a way of understanding how we can give birth to great things. This is not a 2-stage process, but an on-going rhythm of self-care and self-giving, of pausing and moving, of loving self and loving others. Imagine waves on the shore.

Pausing to breathe, center, settle yourself is not ignoring work that must be done, it is preparing for it. The rhythm of Breathe and Push.

This podcast practiced and described some ways of practicing this self-love, self-care. 

What other ways have you found? What might you try?

• Breathing

• Naming and knowing the weights you bear and setting them to the side for later

• Self-care through diet, physical activity, rest

• Gratitude (check our Fabric Gratitude Project for one way to do this together!)

• Wonder

• Nature

The Peace of Wild Things (read by Jeanette Mayo)

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.

I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

~ Wendell Berry

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,

the moon and the stars that you have established;

what are human beings that you are mindful of them,

mortals that you care for them?

Yet you have made us just a little less than Yourself,

and crowned us with glory and honor.

Psalm 8.3-5 NRSV

Something to practice:

You have the ability and responsibility to soothe and center yourself, who else can you help do the same by reaching out to them with your gratitude and love for them? Connect with one person everyday to affirm, thank and encourage them. Have no expectations, but you may be surprised in how it helps you do what you are wishing for them.

A closing meditative, centering poem

Yahweh – I Am Who I Am - my heart is not lifted up,

my eyes are not raised too high;

I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.

But I have calmed and quieted my soul,

like a child at its mother’s breast;

my soul is like a child at its mother’s breast.

O Israel, hope in I Am Who I Am, 

from this time on… and forevermore.

Psalm 131.1-3

Talk more about this with a group

Click HERE for a discussion guide.