Friday 9 January 2015

The Word of the Week - Take a Breath



AFFIRMATION
I direct my thoughts and control my reactions to all circumstances by taking a breath

There was a movie that I watched a while back now called “After Earth” with Will and Jaden Smith.  I don’t think it did very well at the box office but the message that it conveyed was deep and profound.  In a nutshell an estranged father and son crash land on an uninhabited and hostile Earth, where the father is a soldier but is injured, his son has been training to be a soldier and has to go on a perilous journey to get a signal for assistance from their home.  The father has to keep in radio communication with his son and each time his son panics, begins to become stressed out or even frightened, his father orders him to take a knee.  This means he is to literally bow down upon one knee and to take a pause.

To me this was a profound expression because it conveyed that in every circumstance and situation in life, where we are unsettled, panicked or fearful, we need to stop, take a breath and centre yourself to the Divine consciousness within.  Oftentimes the outside world can move at such a speed we feel that it is almost impossible to stop and take a breath because decisions need to made in a heartbeat.  Throughout the film decisions needed to be made in every circumstance,  both in intense life threatening situations and those that were not.  However, throughout it all, the “taking of a knee” was the anchor which enabled the character to succeed in his mission.  Our life mirrors this to some degree, where if our initial thoughts and subsequent reactions are left unchecked it ends up causing us more harm than good because we are unable to filter first the words and the arising emotions that  come in every given situation.

In my earlier teachings, we were told to think five times before we speak in any situation…..in other words to take a breath before we follow through on our first reaction because more often than not in my own experience my first response  to someone annoying me would be to cuss them off or say something that I really did not mean.

Just for today, take a breath, take a pause and take a moment to centre yourself to the Divine within before you say, do or react, this enables you to come from a place of peace and love rather than knee jerk ego aggression.

Have a mindful weekend.


Nameste

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