Take a DEEP breath. Calm your mind and be STILL.

Tue, 23 Jun 2020 15:33:02 -0700

One night when I was constructing This Is Hard But You Can Do It, I printed out every page and laid them all out on my living room floor. I needed to decide the order that each page should be in. As I moved the papers around, I knew, “Take a DEEP breath. Calm your mind and be STILL,” needed to be the first phrase that Mom said to Mac.

In the hard moments when you feel things getting scary, when overwhelmed starts to be the dominant emotion, taking a deep breath is your opportunity to take back control. I’ll tell you the story in a little bit, but for now, let’s just say: You control your breath, you control your life. Something as simple as a few deep breaths can change everything. In fact, learning to take calming breaths has been an absolutely foundational brick of teaching Mac how to do hard things.

We started with this when Mac was just three years old. He had already endured so much fighting AML as a baby, and now he found himself back in the hospital fighting a new cancer. When people would come into the room , he would yell and say, “No!” and, “Don’t touch me!” Helping him focus on his breathing kept his mind on something that HE could control. This was key when, after his three brain surgeries, he had to relearn to walk. Not only was this very physically challenging, it was very obvious that to Mac, the thought of taking those first steps was completely...Read More

This is Hard but You Can Do It!

Take a DEEP breath. Calm your mind and be STILL.