One Breath

Someone asked me recently how I keep my cool amongst chaos (or, as I paraphrased it, “keep my shit together”). I laughed inside, because if keeping it together means having balance, rhythm, perfect habits and morning rituals, then I am very much not there.

Before kids, I used to have early mornings for sports (almost every day), meditation, journaling, and deep work sessions. Now my mornings look more like being up early: holding Mako while half awake, Indi joining, making breakfast, squeezing in a few replies to messages if I am lucky, and trying to move a workshop design forward before the day starts. The space I used to have is most certainly not the space I have now.

And yet, something else has helped, something easier to access amidst the whirlwind:

One breath.

I noticed it in the middle of a session the other day: I was distracted, scattered, checking messages in between facilitating, somewhere between being present for the group and being caught in all the moving parts of life.

Eckhart Tolle once said that “one breath is a meditation”, and that line has been sitting with me like a quiet teacher.

One breath. Then another. Three breaths. It sounds almost embarrassingly simple, but the effect is all I need. Those breaths pulled me back into the room, back to my body, back to the people in front of me and away from the swirl of thoughts and anxiety of the future.

I think that is what one breath does. It brings me back to the moment I am actually living, rather than the moment I am worrying about. Because what matters more is what is happening in this instant rather than what is waiting for me in the next hour.

Sometimes my mind floods. Well, perhaps it does often: too many things to do and not enough space to do them. And if I have a rare pocket of time, a space to do something, I instantly scramble and am not sure how to fill that gap: Do I respond to messages, do I move a proposal forward, do I write something I have been meaning to write? Do I check my email ans WhatsApp messages. My heartbeat rises, and the chaos starts to swell within me.

Yet, lately, if I can catch myself (or become more conscious), I take the wiser choice to pause. One breath first. Maybe two. Maybe a few. Enough to feel a bit more grounded and present before I start the next thing I want to do.

I do not always remember, and I often fall back into checking, chaos, and sporadic reacting. But when I catch myself, I try to remember to breathe. And something shifts ever so slightly. It’s small and subtle enough to make a difference for me.

Maybe keeping it together is less about managing all the moving parts and more about remembering that you can step back into yourself at any moment. You do not need a full meditation practice, three full pages of mourning, or a long morning ritual.

Just one conscious breath. Then another. And sometimes that is enough.