Adi and I know how important breath work is, and like everyone, it is so easy to let a practice slip by finding all the reasons we don't have time. We both know we are blessed with time, and yet we both noticed we conveniently decided, without really deciding, to shelve this practice. That is, until one morning, without even talking about it, we sat, and we breathed, and what we discovered was what we have always known. There is incredible power in the breath.
This doesn't have to be a long practice. Three minutes. That is the entry point. Three minutes of deliberate alternating breath at the start of the day, before the phone, before catching up on everything that's wrong with the world, we make a commitment to what's right with it. Most people have three minutes. The question is whether we will spend them this way. We have found that many times we haven't, and we decided to, once again. This is something we all go through. From time to time, we all let our good habits slide. It's part of this journey we call life.
Forty days is where the shift happens. Not overnight, not after a single session of feeling briefly calm before the chaos resumes. Forty days of three minutes each morning, and the people who commit to it consistently report the same thing in different words: something changed, and I cannot fully explain what, and I do not think I need to.
We found this to be true ourselves.
The photo below was taken at Beach Access 12 on a morning when the Gulf was doing its own work and we were doing ours. The rest of it is in the writing.
P.S. In another life, we had a yoga show on Amazon. If you'd like, take a peak.
Beach Access 12 is where the locals come when they have no interest in being found, the stretch of the Gulf Coast where the sargassum lays thick and rust-colored across the wet sand each morning and the tourists stay away because nobody told them this was beautiful, which is precisely the point. The sun was breaking through the clouds over the water in the particular manner of a Gulf Coast sunrise that has decided to be serious about itself, pulling gold and orange through every gap it could find and laying it across the waves and the sand and the dark carpet of seaweed that the Gulf had delivered overnight. The stilted houses of the people who actually live here stood on the left and the waves came in on the right and in between all of it a truck sat on the sand with its occupants breathing, which is either the simplest thing a person can do or the most profound, depending on how long they have been doing it.
Nadi Shodhana, the ancient practice of channel cleansing through alternating breath, is older than most of what we call history, and the ocean is older than the practice, and at Beach Access 12 in the early morning with the clouds breaking open above the Gulf the two of them meet on equal terms. The breath starts as something a person does deliberately, counted and controlled and conscious, one nostril and then the other, and the waves come in and go out and come in again and somewhere in the middle of all of it the deliberate becomes unnecessary because the ocean has taken over, setting the rhythm that the body follows without being asked, and what felt like breathing turns out to have been something closer to being breathed. We begin each morning believing we are breathing ourselves until we learn, if we are lucky enough and still enough and present enough to notice, that all along the ocean was breathing us.
I’ve spent most of my life onstage, telling stories for laughs and feeling a room shift in real time. For twenty five years I hosted an improvisational show called Four Day Weekend, and that stage felt like home. In 2020 the world shifted, and so did I. The questions of the world began to matter more to me than comedy, and I turned toward writing about life's greater mysteries, finishing We’ll Always Have Paris and later Quietude, which became a quiet turning point in my life. Exploring The 12 Universal Laws widened the lens even more. Now the island reflections and everyday synchronicities I share carry one intention, which is to help you awaken to your highest potential. I am not here to convince or impress you. I simply hope to brighten your day, invite you to question what you have been told, and remind you of what you already know. Each morning I return to the same ground. I am awake. I am aware. I am able. I remember. Everything I share grows from there.