Noticing that inside this very breath is the opportunity to find a spacious freedom. Often it seems so much life is contained inside a small space. There just isn’t that much space to move or breath. Yet the fact is that this very breath can become a doorway to a spacious, vibrant and beautiful life! No matter what. Whether I am experiencing pain, or pleasure, the fact is that every moment I am breathing, is the very opportunity to open to the alive presence of life.

When we view pain as an opportunity to connect with our inherent aliveness we find the doorway into a place beyond our pain which is free from it, yet is still able to include it.

This seems like some sort of magical entry into a spacious realm where pain can co-exist with freedom, while we are still in pain.

One way of entering into this realm of freedom with pain is through our breath. Recently I received a little card from dear dad. He is suffering quite a lot as he goes through the final stages of his life. He is incontinent, often treated badly by the staff in the rest home where he lives, yet he still has such a deep and profound awareness of the freshness and aliveness in his own breath. He is a able to maintain contact with this life force in his own breath as he goes through the process of his life dropping away. As he goes through the process of his life ending and the suffering of his body, of his pain, of his having to wait long periods of time for nurses to come and attend to his needs. Whether its changing his continence pads, or attending to his pain, or to turn him over, or to pass him something he cant reach in his bedridden state…..through all this Grace comes and gives him the taste of the beauty of his very own breath.

In his pain “full” state he is able to maintain contact with the freedom and beauty that he is as a Soul. This freedom and beauty of his very own nature is the freedom, freshness and beauty of life that he is living in the midst of his own deep physical suffering.

Not only does he suffer from his body function difficulties but he is also suffering from the fact that he can’t be in his home. He so deeply wants to be living with the wife he adores and loves in the home he loves and knows is his home, yet he can’t. In accepting the place, the room, the home he lives in where he is in his rest home, he is finding is own freedom with pain. Not being able to live in the home he loves with his wife whom he adores. Yet somehow there is magic and intelligence in this life that he is living now. In this life where he is now. There is something beautiful and rich right in the heart of this very life. He is recognising this. That in the midst of the very pain and suffering of where he is there is something more. Something more is recognising what is already here that is beyond my pain. What is already here with my pain. What is already here can be a spacious, fresh, aliveness, an awareness that becomes richer, more substantial and real than the very pain itself.