I dare you to.  How often have you been dared?

I came upon  a website called 30days30dares.com the other day.  I thought I would like to do a dare a day, but maybe not for 30 days.  The dare issued out by Fakeku Fatumise appealed to me.  He dared me to breathe into my bigness and bring it out into the world.

Well, I am Chinese, the first born and a born again Catholic.  That should say something to you.  I am forever immersed in guilt and duty, and of course, perfection.  Even though I try my best not to fall into their clutches, down I would fall again and again.  I have  no bigness and my heart feels small and tight.  And my mind chatters ceaselessly into my ear – about how lacking I am, how small I am.

And so I sit and close my eyes.  I relax my shoulders. I take a deep breath in and breathe slowly out through this small opening in my chest.  I feel the opening widening, my chest expanding.  I’m rising out and above myself.  I see myself as this small human being who never thought of herself as being an individual with her own breath.  How could that be, a person with no breath of her own?

Well, she never lived for herself.  She was unconscious.  She was bound by duty and guilt.  Long ago in one conscious moment, she was aware that she would rather be unhappy herself than make another so.  But somehow we have this innate sense of survival and she could not quite forfeit that right.  It was a good thing, she was told by an expert.  Since then, she’s daring to breathe, but sometimes she forgets and falls down, down, down the winding staircase of life.

But I can pick myself up, dust myself off.  I try not to beat myself up too much.  I try not to obsess too much.  I breathe.  My heart is getting bigger and I see it is towards myself that I am being small.  I am unkind and ungenerous towards the one that really matters to me.  Without a me, I cannot do for others.

I DARE me to breathe into my bigness and treat myself with loving kindness.  The rest will follow.