While there is great suffering and pain in loss, there is this other level of suffering and pain that comes with the fear of loss.  I don’t know where, if anywhere, fear fits into the classic “grief cycle”, but it seems to me to be a potent part of grief, if only we are allowed to name it as “pre” grief.

This is what we find ourselves swimming in after the diagnosis.  There is a grief of losing a certain way of being in the world. But there is this other thing that comes with the fear of losing more.  It happens every time a new test is run and we await the results.  It happens every time a question is raised.  It happens every time I watch the doorknob, waiting for the doctor to turn it, walk in, and give us the news.

In this loss and fear of loss, a shallowness threatens to come over me.  There is an immeasurable dimension to this, a spirit-ness, as I’ve come to name it.  Things rumble and churn, my mind is pulled this way and that, a fog of dread descends from an unnamable somewhere.

But there is a very soil-level, measurable reality to it as well.  And I notice this in my breathing.  My breath becomes shallow.  It is short…halting.  It loses its rhythm.

It is the measurable reality to my immeasurable fear and suffering, the soil echo of my spirit response.

The feeling is that something of who I am is being restricted by the circumstances around me.  The ancient Hebrew Scriptures say that I am both dust and breath. In the midst of fear I experience being reduced to just dust.

To which my best response can only be to breathe into the realities and circumstances and pain that I’m feeling, to regain the breath that is the integral part of my being.

I have been through quite a few sessions of physical therapy now, having had to recover from broken bones, separated ligaments, and more recently a surgery.  And in physical therapy, you get to do something called stretching.  If you’re not familiar with it, this is where you inflict intentional pain upon yourself by bending into a position that you would never naturally take.  

It’s great.

But when I would bend in one of these particular ways, the physical therapist would always say the same thing, “Breathe into it.”

And by that they mean that the worst thing I can do when I come to a point of pain is to start doing what I do naturally: take brief, halting, shallow breaths.  Instead, they push me to breathe deeply into the pain, into the tightness, into the stretching.

And nothing stretches you like grief.

So I have been taking my physical therapists’ advice.  In the places where this life is currently stretching me, where this life is inflicting new panoramas of ache and tightness, I am choosing to be intentional by breathing into it.

I have found the ancient practice of the centering prayer to be incredibly helpful in such seasons of turmoil, unknowing, and stretching.  I stop, or quietly walk, and take as deep a breath as I can, receiving all that the Spirit has to offer to me.  Breathing in grace.  And peace.  Breathing in Presence.  And wisdom.  Breathing in comfort.  

And courage.

On the surface, it just looks like breathing.  On a more fundamental level, it is a sacred receiving.

This isn’t a pill.  It doesn’t always displace that ache in my gut, the weight on my heart, the tension in my shoulders.  But right in those very places comes a new awareness, an awareness that I am not alone, that Someone else is breathing into me, leaning into me.

It is an awareness that I am being expanded, that I am moving from shallowness to depth, from staccato living to rhythmic being.