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Polarity, Wholeness, and the Breath of Life
As a course leader for The Coaches Training Institute, Sam House travels globally to train individuals in the Co-active Leadership Model and the Co-active Coaching Model. Co-founder of Polarity Pathways, Sam coaches people and offers workshops emphasizing conscious awareness of emerging polarities in all situations. Sam holds a Master’s Degree in Clinical Social Work and has served as a psychotherapist and administrator in numerous clinical settings.
Hello coaches and leaders! I’m honored to be blogging in Karen’s absence for the next two weeks.
On Wednesday, August 4, 2010, my beloved pooch Jasper died. He exhaled for the last time at 5:25 am. My wife, Heather, and I spent his final night with him on the floor of the family cottage, on a small remote island in Georgian Bay, Ontario. It was his favorite place in the whole world. The joyous puppy always came out in him when in this remarkable place of beauty, even in this 12th year of his magnificent life.
We nearly lost him on the 12-hour car ride from upstate New York to Parry Sound, Ontario. His energy was depleted; he needed to be picked up and put into the car; his breathing was labored.
To our amazement, once upon the island, he revived. He began to walk again, to eat some specially-prepared meals, and even—on his last day—run around the island, barking in his protective and loving way, while watching over swimmers and water-skiers, just like early days.
Over the course of that final night, Jasper’s breathing became quite labored and he struggled to be comfortable. Heather and I stroked him, assuring him that all was well. We tearfully and joyfully shared with him our Jasper memories. There was a magical moment when he simply quit struggling and let go—in a diminishing series of exhales, starting with a big ‘harrumph!’—each one getting smaller and fainter, until the final release of breath was nothing more than a wisp. And he was gone.
I have thought a great deal about that final breath. Witnessing Jasper’s final breath was the witnessing of a bookend of life. He exhaled. It was over. The body was still. In my view, the life force within him—the spirit that was Jasper—had left his body to join with the remarkable life force that surrounds us and moves through us and with us all, all of the time.
I began to think, in a whole new way, about the very first moment of life in this physical form. It always begins with an inhale of air. It is, in fact, the other bookend. Between the first inhale and the final exhale of air, a whole life happens. Love and Hatred, Joy and Despair, Success and Failure, Marriage and Divorce, Creativity and Destruction. All of this happens in the creative dance that occurs between the first inhale of breath and the final exhale of breath.
If we look closely, our lives actually happen in the totality of each and every inhale and exhale. We are fully alive, in this moment…and this moment…because of the combined wholeness of the in-breath and the out-breath. Imagine, for a moment, if we favored the in-breath over the out-breath, as if it were more important! How ridiculous! We need them both—dancing creatively with each other—for life itself to occur.
And yet, we so often live our lives attached to only one side of a “reality”, thinking that by so doing, we have picked the “right” way to live. We bounce between chosen realities, thinking that the next one will satisfy us. Instead, the invitation—no, the necessity—is for us to embrace the whole: the good and the bad, the dark and the light, the in-breath and the out-breath.
For, as Jasper’s first and final breaths so poignantly remind us, Life happens when embracing the totality of it all. As coaches and leaders, may we remember this valuable lesson…with this breath.
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