This morning I woke up, grabbed my coffee, and did what I do almost every morning: I read the news immediately.
It may be too early for the nervous system, but it is a habit I’ve carried for as long as my meditation practice. One practice brings me into presence. The other reminds me why presence is necessary.
Within minutes I could feel it happening: that familiar heat rising in the chest. Rage. Frustration. The sense that the world is being steered by the cruelest and loudest among us while more and more people struggle just to exist with dignity.
Criminals in charge. Hate amplified. Compassion commodified. Outrage industrialized.
It can all fill me with vitriol in the blink of an eye. And maybe what’s hardest is the helplessness. The recognition that despite all the noise, all the posting, all the arguing, the machinery continues forward untouched. That inability to create meaningful change can become demoralizing if you let it settle too long in the body.
But this morning, before the anger fully rooted itself, something happened automatically. My attention moved to the breath. Not as an idea. Not as a spiritual performance. Not as something forced. Just breath. In. Out.
Almost immediately, the storm lost some of its gravity.
What an astonishing tool the breath is. So simple the mind overlooks it entirely, yet one of the most powerful technologies for returning ourselves to the present moment. A kind of wave that washes over consciousness, briefly pulling the poison out with the undertow before retreating back into the sea.
The breath does not solve the world. But it can stop the world from completely consuming you.
Over the years, I’ve approached this through many contemplative paths. Sometimes silently chanting “So’ham” with each inhale and exhale. Sometimes watching the breath rise to its apex before dissolving again. Sometimes meeting intrusive thoughts with the quiet internal response: “I Am Not This.”
Different methods. Same doorway.
I began actively meditating and studying contemplative practices in 2001. The following year, I taught my first meditation class at the request of a friend at their workplace. Looking back now honestly makes me laugh. I knew so little and believed I knew so much. Sweet summer child. 🤣
Since then I’ve wandered through various schools of Buddhism and Hinduism, transcendental meditation, occult practices, absurdist philosophy, and eventually into the strange hybrid landscape I inhabit now. But through every transformation, every philosophical molting, one thing remained constant: the breath was always waiting for me.
It became the anchor beneath every changing identity.
Most days when I sit now, the “committee of mind” eventually leaves for recess. Thoughts still arrive at first, of course. The mind fights the silence in the beginning. It floods the room with reminders, anxieties, plans, memories, fantasies, arguments that never happened, and arguments that happened twenty years ago and somehow still need revisiting.
But if I stay long enough, something shifts. The committee adjourns. And in the absence of all that internal negotiation, silence slowly permeates the shared space of consciousness. What once felt uncomfortable now feels restorative. Even the mind seems grateful for the break.
That doesn’t mean the world suddenly becomes okay. The fires are still burning. People are still suffering. The machinery of greed and spectacle continues grinding forward exactly as before.
But instead of immediately throwing myself into those flames psychologically, I remember to breathe first. Not to escape reality. Not to become passive. Not to spiritually bypass the suffering of others. But because rage without presence only creates more fire.
And maybe that’s the real practice: learning how to remain human in a world that constantly rewards reactivity.
So if you wake tomorrow and feel the anger rising as the headlines flood your nervous system, pause for a moment before diving into the inferno. Meet the breath. It has been waiting for you longer than any ideology, outrage cycle, or empire ever existed. And unlike most things in this world, it asks nothing from you except attention.