Are you holding your breath waiting for some future moment to arrive?
Take a moment to relax. Count out five seconds and then take three deep stomach breaths. As you breathe, focus your awareness on how your stomach and rib cage expand as your breath flows in and then out. In and out. In and out. Just for this moment, allow your thoughts to drift towards the edges of your mind, and then let them go. Be here fully for the next ten minutes.
Now that you have created a space of calm and presence, you are ready to tap into the peace, energy, and power that is only available from being fully present. Now, contemplate this and the following questions with true honesty.
“Are you holding your breath waiting for some future moment to arrive?”
Is there something that is constantly on your mind, an overwhelming urge to attain or to reach some point in the future? Do you feel a constant mental resistance to the idea of slowing down and being present in your life now because of your urge to reach this future goal?
Is there some future vision that precludes you from seeing the good in your life here and now, or being present in both body and mind with your family and friends rather than in body only as your mind remains fixated on getting to that future vision state? Do you often skip dinner invites or come home from work much later than you said you would have because you feel compelled to offer more allegiance to this future vision than your life right now?
Does a pervasive anxiety disrupt your ability to relax and enjoy downtime during your weekends or while on vacation? Does it manifest in a burning, hooked kind of feeling that orders you to constantly be thinking about and grinding towards this future goal, lest you lose any of the progress you have so painstakingly gained?
If this resonates with you - if even only in the slightest - then I urge you for your own sake and that of the people who care about you to keep reading. Continue to be present. Stay open and allow your curiosity to carry you forward.
Holding your breath now waiting for some future moment to arrive may at first feel stimulating or exciting as you are filled with such a passion or intrigue that you can scarcely remember to breathe. However, the reality is that this habit of holding your breath, if left unchecked, will gradually meld into your subconscious, where it can begin to suffocate you. This habit of holding your breath waiting for the future to arrive will deprive you of the vital life energy that comes from being willing and able to make space to be fully present in the here and now. When you hold your breath thinking about the future and prevent yourself from exhaling on weekends, evenings, or vacations, it doesn’t get you to the future faster; it only serves to strengthen your mind’s illusory belief that the future is really all that matters in life.
When you make a habit of holding your breath, the ego will slyly attempt to convince you that all the times you sacrificed your life in the present to the hope of the future will be made in vain if you don’t keep that routine up. The ego wants to convince you of this because the ego doesn’t feel alive when you are simply enjoying who you are here and now in the present moment. The ego only feels alive when you are striving towards the future fantasies or vision of self it projects inside your head. The ego is what makes you envision yourself as a successful vice president, multi-millionaire, or globe trotter, and encourages you to think that happiness and fulfillment will only come from being able to live those lives. If you believe that your ego’s vision of self is the only way to be happy or fulfilled, then the ego will have a position of strength, from which it will likely convince you that the only way to achieve that future life requires even more sacrifice of your present life. If you continue to double down on the future, this is when holding your breath waiting for that future moment risks morphing from a gripping purpose into an uncontrollable cycle of addiction. Egos are relative. No matter how much or how little you have, your ego will always attempt to convince you that you need more.
In this cycle, where your increasing sacrifice of the present makes you feel the need to sacrifice even more to make the previous sacrifices worthwhile, the fulfillment or fun that you used to enjoy in the beginning stages of breathlessness can transform into various mental afflictions, such as mania about self-sacrifice, extreme anxiety over any setbacks in pursuit of that future vision, or resentment or bitterness towards others who seem to be enjoying their present lives and not willing to sacrifice the now to the future as you are. At this stage of the holding your breath metaphor, you will become blue in the face as pain seeps into the quiet edges in your life when distractions abate or you are too exhausted to strive and finally exhale, which creates a rare and sober present moment. The pain arises when you come face-to-face with the reality of the cyclical, rising levels of sacrifice you have committed to, which may happen before falling asleep, looking at yourself in the bathroom mirror, waiting to board a plane home, on Sunday evenings when socializing is over and the workweek is about to begin, or even on Friday evenings when workweek is over and the ability to distract yourself via interactions with colleagues ends.
But falling down this rabbit hole of future fixation is not how life has to go for you, or for any of us.
It is possible to continue breathing and enjoying our lives every single day, while still having a purpose and working diligently towards that purpose. It’s just a matter of remembering to keep breathing.
“Whatever it is that you are craving far out in the future does not represent your sole purpose in life.”
In order to learn how to keep breathing, it is important to realize that achieving some future moment of success in your job, career, status, wealth, material goods, or even romantic relationship is not the sole purpose of your life. Your purpose is at once much grander and simpler than that, and achieving fulfillment or meaning in your life is far more accessible than you think.
There is no reason to hold your breath so that you can hurry towards a future point, because there will be no point at which you actually finish the journey known as your life. The reality is that every time you achieve a future point you have been striving towards, you - or rather your ego - will very quickly come up with a new one. And that’s okay! That’s the ego’s job, after all, to keep us constantly striving towards goals. But we are not our egos. We are conscious, sentient beings with the power of complex minds, who have the ability to decide when, where, and how to leverage the powerful tools called ego that we possess.
The intensity with which our egos urge us onward to future goals is what makes us hold our breath, what makes us believe at a sub or semi-conscious level that if we achieve that envisioned goal within the time frame we imagine, we will finally be able to relax, kick back, and bask in the permanent boost in self esteem we have achieved; however, the ego knows fully that there will be no rest and relaxation at the point of achieving that goal, and veils this truth from us to urge us on as if our lives - or life fulfillment - depends on it. This is the ego’s method of trickery to keep us in a state of constant striving, and this is what can ultimately lead us to addiction.
So, if reaching each future point is an endless cycle, then what reason is there to hold your breath in the first place? Your ego may attempt a rebuff, such as “it helps to look back and see all the previous points that you achieved along the way serving as points of reference, and the sum total of those points is what creates fulfillment and meaning.”
The answer can be tricky to unpack, but stay with me for a moment.
You certainly can look back at the previous goals you have achieved and be proud. The problem with setting and achieving goals lies in whether or not you believe that that setting and achieving new goals is necessary - the only way - to become fulfilled. If you tie your life’s purpose or fulfillment to the continuous achievement of egoic goals (which by definition are asymptotic and become exponentially more difficult to achieve; see the ego’s incompatibility with modern society), then it will set you up to hold your breath and be chronically unhappy, or worse.
The reason is that you can only influence life and what happens to you, but you cannot control anything in the world. The universal truth is one of constant change; life a series of cycles of birth/death, gain/loss, pain/pleasure - called saṃsāra in Buddhism. So eventually, something outside of your sphere of influence will happen that knocks you off your desired rate of ascent. When this happens, if you believe that the next point is your purpose, and essential to creating fulfillment or meaning for you, then you won’t be able to exhale. You won’t be able to accept what happened and then either take a break, resume climbing towards the same point at a slower pace, or set course for a new point altogether. If you are holding your breath trying to achieve that one future ideal (which will become a new one future ideal soon), then you have sentenced yourself to purgatory: living in an inflexible prison within your mind, while your body exists in the real world where the only constant is change. Sooner or later you’ll be broken by your rigidity, like a building in an earthquake. In these times of disappointment in your life trajectory is when the risk of addiction and mental afflictions becomes a key concern.
For example: if after leaving college you get a good job in tech, and then start your own company, you might begin holding your breath waiting for a successful exit of your company. The longer you hold your breath, the more okay with working 12+, 14+, 16+ hour days you’ll be, the fewer vacations or weekends you will allow yourself not to work during, the more you will disengage from family, friends or a significant other to work, and the more you will drive your employee culture to sacrifice their own lives for the good of the company. So long as you are achieving your set milestones, there may be no discernable problems. However, if you miss a funding round or have a down round, if you lose a big customer, if an acquisition deal falls through, or if your exit ends up being less than you hope for, then you will probably feel an intense feeling of being lost, depressed, a failure, or worthless. Yet you can’t ultimately control what happens to your company. So why hold your breath and push aside everything in the present, assuming that the more you work and sacrifice, the closer to the perfect exit you will get? Why believe that the perfect exit will make you happy or fulfilled, either, when the reality is that there will be some new, bigger goal immediately after, such as becoming a successful angel investor, exiting from a second company for a bigger amount, or becoming a best-selling business author? Why not continue breathing and work only 12, or 10, or 9 hours Monday through Friday, take a real vacation, learn to cook or make music, deepen your relationships with old or new friends, date, or spend time with aging family along the way?
You can still work towards your goal of an exit, but if you breathe along the way, then you will be less stressed along the way, because your life has become more than just being your company identity, and therefore your entire self worth will not hinge on what happens to your company.
Or: you may be holding your breath waiting for some big, anxiety-producing event to pass, like a big presentation, test, or wedding. For a moment, the anxiety that makes you start holding your breath serves a purpose. You need to prepare, after all. But once you have prepared to an adequate degree, the anxiety has served its purpose, and should be allowed to dissipate. If you don’t let it dissipate and instead allow yourself to continue obsessing over the event, then you’ll be holding your breath and ignoring the diverse and many opportunities to be present and actually enjoy your life along the way, before the event passes. And how many such events have there been, or will there be in your life? Wouldn’t you rather learn to be present and continue living your life no matter what is going on? Is being an anxious person really an identity the inner you - not your ego - want to have?
If we don’t learn to appreciate the fact that the happiness or relief we feel upon reaching an achievement is cyclical and ephemeral, then we will feel unhappy and unfulfilled in the grand scheme. No amount of anxiety, work, or holding our breath will make the future events we are holding out for happen sooner or later, go perfectly, or make us fulfilled.
The only way to break the cycle is to learn to breathe throughout our lives and to resist the urge to sacrifice everything in the present to the future. Make space throughout the day to breathe by going outside for a walk when you’re feeling low energy or stressed, call a friend to catch up after work, do a morning meditation, or plan a spontaneous weekend road trip.
The purpose of your life is to simply enjoy the journey, no matter where it goes. As you learn to continue breathing and be fully present, you will automatically realize a deep appreciation for not only what is to come, but what is already all around you, which produces meaning and fulfillment.
Stay tuned for more musings on how to live mindfully in a modern society that does not make it easy, and in doing so discover and resonate more happiness, love, peace, energy, and meaning.