Your Soul Food for Friday May 2, 2025: Self-Compassion- Meditation Musings, Help Leaders Reclaim Their Energy, and What we can All Learn from Embracing the Japanese Concept of “Oubaitori”

Happy Soul Food Friday!

This week:

• Breath and choice – Meditation Medicine Musings with Eric Kaufmann
• Help Leaders Reclaim Their Energy with Suneel Gupta
• What we can all learn from embracing the Japanese concept of “oubaitori”

Breath and Choice – Meditation Medicine Musings with Eric Kaufmann:

Dear friends in practice,

It’s Monday, and this morning, as I sat to meditate with our Monday group, I could feel the familiar tug of the week ahead – meetings waiting, tasks beckoning, the current of action already moving under the surface. It would have been easy, quite automatic, to be carried off into planning and preparation. Instead, I noticed the pull, nodded inwardly at its persistence, and – gently, deliberately – chose to return to the breath.

No battle, no criticism. Just a quiet remembering: this breath, this moment, this choice.

Breath meditation is often described as simple – and it is. What is more simple than attending to the most elemental function of our life? The very first action we took upon being delivered from our mother’s body was to take a breath. It is natural, with us our whole life, and happens all on its own. Yet within that simplicity nestles a profound invitation. Every time we return to the breath, we are practicing, and getting closer and closer to becoming, a conscious being at choice. I love this phrase – a conscious being at choice. It comes as close as I know to operationalizing enlightenment. This is exercising the core of awakening: the ability to see clearly what arises, and to choose, freely and compassionately, where to place our attention.

The mind spins its stories. The heart feels its tides. The body broadcasts its hungers. That is the nature of being alive. Our practice is not to extinguish these movements – what is life without mind, heart, or body? Our practice is to notice them – and to realize that we are not their prisoner. Remarkably, we are NOT fated or destined to roll blindly into our patterns. We are free, moment by moment, to anchor in what is steady, real, and alive within us.

I invite Carl Jung to weigh in here as he wrote, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it Fate.” Jung, having explored the concepts of destiny and patterns, suggests that unconscious influences shape our lives, often manifesting as seemingly predetermined patterns. He believed that understanding and integrating these unconscious forces was crucial for personal growth and realizing one’s true potential, essentially overcoming the illusion of “fate.”

So how does breath meditation help us overcome the illusion of fate? Because it cultivates awareness and choice. Breath meditation helps make the unconscious conscious because we note, in real time, what is arising. Choosing to return again and again and again to the breath is the real-time and real-world expression of a conscious being at choice. Conscious of what’s unfolding, arising, demanding, and compelling. And at choice about whether to be swept along in the compulsion, or to – gently and firmly – choose your path. 

As you take your seat this week, I offer this encouragement: Let each breath be an act of courage and curiosity, a small and sacred choice to belong to this moment. 

And, while being curious, check in with yourself: What shifts in me when I truly remember that I am free to choose?

With warmth and gratitude,
Eric

Help Leaders Reclaim Their Energy with Suneel Gupta:

Keynote Suneel Gupta helps leaders reclaim their energy – Massachusetts Municipal Association (MMA)

What we can all learn from embracing the Japanese concept of “oubaitori”
It’s an important reminder that everyone is on their own journey and timeline.

What the Japanese concept oubaitori teaches us about comparison

Please pay it forward.

Love,

Neville

Linked-In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nevillebillimoria
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“Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.” – Victor Frankl