2015 - 60 Second Miracle

http://yiddish.forward.com/articles/193502/people-of-interest-chani-getter-spiritual-counsel/

Gretchin Rubin writes in her book Happier at Home: I remind myself, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”(Cribbed from Voltaire.) A twenty-minute walk that I do is better than the four-mile run that I don’t do.  The imperfect book that gets published is better than the perfect book that never leaves my computer. The dinner party of take-out Chinese food is better than the elegant dinner that I never host.

I will add, the 1-minute of conscious breathing is better then the 30 minute meditation that I never sit for.

A healthy adult takes 12 – 20 breaths per minute. We breathe every day, every hour, every minute, every second.  Whether consciously or not, our bodies bring air into our lungs that sustains us and gives us life.

In this crazy busy and hectic life society has created, we often think that the only way to find our center is to meditate or run or do something for half an hour or more.  Since we don’t have that much time, we often spend our days, running from one thing to the other. We are as the hamster on its wheel, in constant motion but never moving forward.

However, all we need to do is to take one minute, wherever we may be, 60 seconds of conscious breathing to shift that feeling. Take a minute, use the timer on your phone, and breathe.  Notice your breath, notice your body, and without needing to change anything… breathe. You will see that simply from your connecting to what you are already doing (breathing), everything changes, ever so slightly in just one minute.

Click on this link to a Yiddish interview (with Englishsubtitles), where I discuss this phenomenon in a little more detail.