Breathe

It is so easy to get overwhelmed in this fast paced world. There is always something going on somewhere, a tragedy, a struggle, a celebration....a torrent of emotions tumbling through our world causing us physically and emotionally to go into overload very quickly. When you're suffering from trauma that tends to happen more easily and it's easy to be traumatised by this world and by life. During admissions up to TDU (the Trauma and Dissociation Unit) one of the amazing nurses there would constantly tell us to BREATHE.

One particular day I asked her if I could skip the rest of group and go to my room. I was on the verge of breaking to pieces and she could see it. She wanted to talk, I wanted to run. As she literally chased me down in the corridor and sat me down and I sobbed away in front of her (not something I do all that easily), she sat with me and when I was ready she encouraged me to breathe. Just breathe. Not deep breathing necessarily, although sometimes a well placed deep breath just slows us down to allow us to return to normal breathing, but just breathing, in and out. The other thing breathing does though, in its amazing wisdom is, it allows us to take the world at just that moment in time. Instead of being overwhelmed by the next hour or day or week or month, or however far ahead in time we are being overwhelmed by, we are bought back to just that moment in time and we can live there. Then we can move forward.

We need to remember to breathe so we can remember that sometimes we don't need to live in the future but just that minute in time, that we'll be okay and everything else will work itself out. We DO need to keep making decisions as we go along and we make those decisions at the time with the best information we have available to us at that time, sometimes the decision is to not make a decision then and sometimes it is to finalise a decision altogether. But we breathe, and make the decision and we move forward, just living every minute or maybe 5 minutes at a time. Remember to just breathe.

Five Minutes at a Time - Superchick
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqyB91HdvZ4

Five Minutes at a Time - Superchick
Life is hard, but it's been a little harder than usual lately
I wish I knew why I am struggling through this
What makes it harder is the lack of understanding on my part
Could I have changed this, why am I fighting life so hard?

How long can I survive this? I'm losing the strength to try
Tell me how am I supposed to live through this? How do we get by?

We take one breath and let it out
We take another and maybe somehow everything will work out to be just fine
We take life 5 minutes at a time

Life is hard - it didn't turn out like I hoped it would be
And I don't dare to dream if dreaming leads to this
'Cause when it's left to me, it's hard to see past the sky becoming dark
If it makes no difference, why am I trying to do my part?

I've climbed back from that fall again it feels like a hundred times
How do I believe in a hundred and one when we stumbled the ninety-nine?

To go on living when all you've lived for is gone
To find faith when everything you know about life might be wrong
To find hope in the dark, to still believe there's a dawn
This is the courage to make a life, it is the strength to go on