The Next Thing: Fatherhood, Breathwork & The Path
Fatherhood
I love walking the streets at night in my black Don’t Eat The Homies sweatshirt with the hood up.
Right hand in my pants pocket.
Left arm swinging with each stride.
I maneuver through a crowd on my way back from an arena show - a concert filled with affluent young professionals, noticing the messages they are communicating through their styles and presentation. I bounce past group after small group - it all feels like a modern mating ritual, presentation of status, gorillas showing their teeth.
In these moments, I love thinking about my daughter.
I love remembering I’m a dad.
It feels like I’ve wanted to be a better person my whole life in preparation for this moment.
And yet, the moment-to-moment learning and awareness that comes with staring your newborn in the eyes cannot be accounted for.
It’s crazy to think she knows nothing.
She knows nothing of the pain in this world, nor the joys, beauty, or bliss.
I want to protect her from any and all loss of innocence.
And yet I want to throw her in the deep end of life with me - hold her and shape her.
Being a father to a daughter is such a privilege, with levels that span societal and ancestral glory and trauma.
There has been another fear: The fear of losing myself.
It is very natural to perceive these large changes in our lives as loss/rebirth cycles. I grieve for the pre-father version of myself, the young man with fewer responsibilities and more freedoms. The altruistically channeled selfishness that fueled his professional and personal passions - catalyzing friendships and weaponizing spontaneity.
I would weep internally that these parts of me, these opportunities were lost and gone. Terminal.
There can be a shift here.
That these large changes actually bring us closer to ourselves. That the necessary aspects of our lives prior will not only survive, but serve as critical elements in our style of fatherhood.
There is a simplicity to parenthood - the child becomes the clear north star for your life. And your pursuits outside of them fall into supporting roles. Not in the lesser sense, but roles that truly support you and your child along these paths of growth. Parenthood strips away what is unuseful, not conducive to your ability to preserve life in your child, and in yourself. It’s a lifestyle detox that - like other forms of detox - can be met with visceral withdrawal symptoms. It can revert you back to the childlike refusal and rejection that has laid dormant in you during your life of pacification.
In sum, the highs are eternally higher than I expected and the lows are more or less where I thought they’d be.
It is an unspeakable gift to watch and interact with her. A greater purpose that throws me closer to the person I’m meant to be.
Breathwork Facilitation
On Tuesday this past week, I began training to become a breathwork facilitator.
After being involved in the mental health and wellness industry for over 15 years, I am now committing to a modality of healing.
This is wild and new to me, considering I spent my adolescence and college days fantasizing about what kind of psychotherapist I would be.
I attended a Master’s of Counseling program at CUNY for 2 weeks before dropping out.
Despite all my inner assurances and momentum, after crafting so much of my identity around being a psychotherapist up to that point in my young life, it just didn’t feel right.
I listened - closely.
And that was the beginning of this different path.
To facilitate healing is a sacred act, practiced across all instances of human civilization. For a sensitive person like myself, this feels like a lot to carry.
In my work with my personal therapist - who happens to be certified in Holotropic breathwork herself - and my breathwork trainer - a modern medicine man with whom I’ve worked deeply in ceremony settings - it has confirmed that the pursuit of this training must be tied to the call to connect deeper with the world around you.
I’ve noticed myself wanting to talk less. I want to learn how to communicate with energy.
A culture leveraging cerebral, heady mediums like audio, video, and the written word. In our deepest, more meaningful moments with others or ourselves, these mediums are rarely involved.
Presence, silence, and gradual realizations.
The container in which we can exist.
The exchanges that take place in a space.
Closing your eyes and noticing - deeply.
The inner shifts that often go unobserved throughout our days, can become the headlines of our life, never again answering the question of:
How are you?
with
I’m good
The medicine of breath seems so simple, natural, and obvious. There are no politics or human ugliness that clouds the inevitability of your next breath coming, and learning to use it to heal.
I’ve thought a lot about liberation, how one can feel multiple instances of liberation in their life.
Liberation processes are reminders, not jailbreaks. There are no physical or metaphysical barriers holding us back. The liberation process is one of awareness - awareness that we have been free this whole time. The silliness of this moment when you understand the self-inflicted protective prisons we construct around attachments and long held beliefs. The interesting part of held beliefs is that you can, in fact, let them go.
Things that I once thought were reserved for a privileged class - breathwork facilitation, being a father - now seem very accessible.
A soft reminder to keep your eyes on things that attract you, no matter how far away they may appear. The distance will be made up in time. It’s inevitable.
The Path
I love music for many reasons.
One of which is the change you see in artists from album to album.
Whether their style changes drastically or marginally, the phasic nature of an artist progressing through life and documenting it consciously and subconsciously through a timeline of art.
Artists and their fans grow simultaneously, even symbiotically.
An artist’s breakout, coming of age, commercialization, maturation, and eventual decline can mirror many of our trajectories.
It all symbolizes The Next Thing. Our next album. The idea that there never was an end to what we do, no conclusion.
Instead, The Path itself is the end.
The ongoing process serves as the container for what we see as conscious limits on life and our purpose.
Here’s to The Next Thing.