The other day I was driving and someone came flying up behind me. Close enough that I could feel it. I noticed my grip tightening on the wheel, and my chest pulling in just a little. As my attention narrowed, I found myself watching the car in the rearview mirror.
Nothing had really happened, yet something in me was activated.
For a moment, I could see it happening.
It’s easy to carry that activation forward. Even after the car passes, the tension doesn’t always go with them. It can follow us into the next conversation and affect the way we respond to things that normally wouldn’t matter. We carry a little more edge in our voice, and less patience than we had a few minutes before.
What I’m starting to see is that when something like that rises in us, it doesn’t just disappear. It stays in the body for a while. If we don’t give it a moment, it has a way of showing up somewhere else.
That moment of seeing it gives us a choice. We can pause, take a breath, and give it a little space, instead of carrying it forward.
One of the simplest ways I’ve found to do that is to come back to my breath. Just noticing it. Slowing it down a little. Letting the exhale be a bit longer than the inhale. Giving my body a chance to settle instead of immediately reacting.
It doesn’t make the moment disappear. The person behind me may still be there. It does change what happens next.
And the more I pay attention, the more I see this isn’t just about that moment.
There’s something in us that doesn’t like to hold tension for very long. When it builds, it starts looking for somewhere else to go.
Before we realize it, there’s a pull to bring someone else into it with us, to push what we’re feeling out into the world.
René Girard wrote about how human beings deal with tension and conflict, especially in Violence and the Sacred. He points to how quickly we move what we feel out of ourselves and onto something or someone else.
And you don’t have to look very far to see it. It shows up in small moments like this all the time.
For me, I’m still learning that sometimes it’s as simple as pausing for a moment and letting my breath slow things down.
Sometimes it’s getting up and walking, letting my body move while whatever I’m carrying begins to soften. Other times it’s using something like mala beads, running them through my fingers to give my breath somewhere to land.
None of it is complicated. None of it is perfect.
It’s enough, sometimes, to keep what I’m feeling from becoming something I hand off to someone else.
Maybe the work is simpler than we think.
Notice what you’re carrying. Give it a moment.
You might not change the moment.
But you might change what happens next.
I also recorded a walking meditation to go along with this.
It’s a simple practice called Stay With What You Feel, using your breath and your steps to give yourself a little space to be with what’s here.
If you’d like something more experiential, you can find it here:
If you want to listen to the meditation on your podcast app you can find a link to that here:
https://www.vitalhealing.org/p/listen-to-the-vital-healing-podcast
I’ll be sharing more of these over the next few weeks, both here and on YouTube.