Over the past six months, I have been working on the notion of letting go.

Primarily, letting go of worry: negative unwanted thoughts.

My go to mantra for the past few months has been to focus on my breath, inhale and exhale. The other day I decided to change my mantra: to let go. I was inhaling and exhaling with let go replaying in my head over and over. I realized something completely vital.

Every day since I was born, 365 days for the past 26 years, I have let go of something almost every single second of those 9,490 days, in even the 1,440 seconds of each of those days. This totals to over 13.5 million times each year that I have let go.

The even more impressive note is that I let go of the most important thing to my life in each of those seconds. And every single time it comes back, without fail.

And you do this too, every day since you were born—1,440 seconds a day for 365 days each year.

It’s prana; life source, breath.

So if we can let go of our lifeline over 1,000 times a day and trust that it will come back, why can’t we let go of worry?

Why can’t we trust life to offer, what I refer to as, the sprinkles (joy, love, friendship, success, good fortunes) if we can trust it to offer the essential…literally, our breath?

This notion is humbling, isn’t it?

It is kind of jaw dropping to think that we let go of something so crucial to our life, thousands of times a day, without wondering if it will come back. Yet, we worry about the sprinkles.

There is a tendency to focus on what we do not have, what life has not offered us. I would try to let go of the worry of being alone, for example, trusting that life will offer love when I am ready. But within a day, the same thoughts would come back. It was a vicious cycle.

Now I realize that I’ve breathed every day since I was born, for the past 26 years. I have taken over 1.2 trillion breaths. I let go and trust that I will breathe again over 1.2 trillion times.

If I trust the universe and myself to provide the prana to keep me alive every day, then it is time to trust that love, and all the sprinkles of life, will come when they do.

 

Relephant:

Awesome Demonstration—the Power of Breath—what Happens when we Breathe.

 

Author: Tira Hanrahan

Editor: Catherine Monkman

Photo: Marie Aschehoug/Flickr