Breathing is Action

Customizable meditative affirmations for teens and adults, giving its audience agency over their emotional development, personal growth and well-being.

Chapter 2: Innocence 02/27/2025

Chapter 1: Resilience 01/30/2025

Chapter 1: Resilience Resilience is the fourth and final meditation for Chapter 1: Emotional First Aid Kit. What first comes to mind when you see the word resilience? Resilience is a nuanced concept. Resilience is more than just courage or confidence. It is more than just being disciplined, showing up and putting in the effort. It includes qualities like determination and adaptability. Most importantly, resilience is our ability to encounter challenges or adversity, to rise above to continue moving forward. Being resilient is being capable of learning from our mistakes or from dark periods of our life; to use the lessons we pull from our failings or our suffering in a sustained effort to help guide our actions and decisions for a better future. Resilience doesn’t exist if there hasn’t been hardship before it. You don’t just wake up one day, suddenly resilient. It’s in the actions we take following difficult moments when our resiliency can be most acknowledged with awareness. It’s something that’s worked on, built upon and then fully recognized further down the line. Resilience is a long-term investment of the soul. We all encounter, endure or contribute to challenges in our lives that teach us hard lessons about resilience. If we successfully learn from those moments, we can apply our earned wisdom to future situations that bring up similar emotions. When times get tough, practice diving into your toolkit and tapping into your earned resilience. Here are 3 takeaways from my own personal learned lessons on resilience: One: Know with complete certainty that you deserve happiness. You deserve to be treated with kindness, love and respect. Resilience thrives in the knowing that each and everyone of us deserves to be at peace. You, the person reading this, wholeheartedly deserves happiness, meaning and purpose. It is healthy to ensure you’re being treated with kindness and consideration of your feelings. We all have different standards of what we allow into our lives. It’s helpful to assess if your life, and the people in it, reflect those standards and if you’re living a life that is aligned with what’s in your heart. You always and eventually get to have a choice. In the face of hardship or mistreatment from others, choose your happiness. Know that you are worthy of it, every single day. Two: Learn to recognize when it’s time to persevere and when it’s time to quit. Throughout my life, I have had to change my definition of success because I have often felt a pressure to succeed and perform well beyond my capacity. The grind culture we live in, and especially throughout adolescence, we’re bombarded with the expectation to find ourselves quickly and be successful TM (whatever that means). Let’s be clear, everyone’s definition of success is different anyway. While I believe having a goal to work towards is incredibly important, I have found it helpful to continuously assess my wellbeing as I build my life. Doing so ensures I don’t rush through things, and it prevents burning myself out. A part of resiliency is knowing how to recognize when a direction or avenue has been exhausted. I have learned the incredible skill of closing doors and starting anew when necessary. It is healthy and wise to assess whether a project, goal or relationship continues to be aligned with your values or not, and to be brave enough to make the decision to end it if you need to. I am not saying to give up simply because things get tough, but for some us who stick it out much longer than we should, it is helpful to know that it is okay to respectfully walk away from what isn’t working and start somewhere new or put your focus somewhere else. It is not a moral failing to call it quits when the situation calls for it. Sometimes a completely unsatisfying situation becomes comfortable, and it feels favourable over the unknown. Revitalizing a stagnant situation can be great for the soul, especially if we take our learned lessons with us and refuse to repeat the patterns that got us there in the first place. Three: Have a vision of what you want life to feel like. Cultivate a blind faith that you can and will achieve it. When times gets tough, it can be helpful to have a guiding light to hold on to. Having a direction to walk in is helpful in building mental and emotional strength, even if it’s unclear how to get there or what exactly the road looks like ahead. Instead of trying to pick what job you want, how many kids you’ll have or what you’d like your relationship to look like… I recommend building a vision of what you want your life to feel like. Have a clear understanding of why you want to have that emotional experience. Why does that align with you and your values? Cultivate a belief that you can achieve it, like a blind, naïve faith that it will all work out. Hope isn’t foolish. A “clear-enough” picture in our hearts about what we want helps to keep one foot in front of the other, forging the path ahead. Over time, we grow an understanding how we want to feel. The path on how to get there becomes clearer. We see tiny steps forward, while holding the big picture in our heart. Slow down and take your time. Get to know what fills your heart with fulfillment and meaning. Bonus: Inspire yourself from the stories of others. Resiliency is a skill like any other. It is a quality we can cultivate. It is something we can practice. We can inspire ourselves with the stories of others and how they overcame their challenges. We can learn from those who traveled before us. We actively look for lessons to learn from that could benefit our own travels. It’s no wonder our history books are filled with stories of people who embody resilience: Anne Franke, Maya Angelou, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi. When times are good, we can gather information and inspiration so that when hardships inevitably return, our motivation and strength of character are more easily accessible to us. We’re primed to pick ourselves up and get back on track. We too can find our own way forward despite the obstacles. Know that you can do anything you set your heart to. Believe that you can, and will, get through the toughest situations. Hardship is not fun. Perseverance isn’t easy. But recognizing your resiliency after adversity is a particularly satisfying healing state for the soul. Respectfully let go of what doesn’t serve you. Take good care of your heart, always. --- Chapter 1: Emotional First Aid Kit Self-Love Navigating Anger Navigating Sadness Resilience --- BREATHING IS ACTION is a meditative affirmation podcast for teens and adults. For everyone, everywhere. Let's be the change we want to see in the world! Writing, research and production by: Macie Leblanc-Smith Editing by: Macie Leblanc-Smith, Marc-Olivier Plouffe Music: Serena by Bireli Snow on Epidemic Sound --- Find us on - Website: Instagram: Facebook: --- Listen on - YouTube: Spotify: Amazon Music: iHeart: /episode/index/show/afa121c5-475b-4d04-8908-3c91840e7bf9/id/35083995

Chapter 1: Navigating Sadness 01/16/2025

Chapter 1: Navigating Sadness Navigating Sadness is the third meditation for Chapter 1: Emotional First Aid Kit. Emotions give us insight and information about ourselves and our needs, and sadness is of no exception. Sadness is deeply uncomfortable and often times more unpleasant to feel than anger. While anger can sometimes provide us with a sense of strength and motivation, sadness is the opposite. Sadness brings us face to face with our heartache. It often asks us to stop, rest and isolate. It is a vulnerable state and that doesn’t always feel very safe. Somewhere along the way, we might’ve learned that outwardly showing our tears left us open and exposed to misunderstandings, invalidation or emotional neglect. Anger then becomes the safer option and camouflages the reality that we are actually in a lot of emotional pain. When someone chooses to unlearn seeing vulnerability as weakness, it really is a journey for the bravest of souls because it goes against the norm. The truth is a lot of societies continue to see depression as laziness, crying children as spoiled or a gloomy mood as annoying. However, it bears repeating, that emotions are simply information. Being sad is not a moral failing. Being happy might be more pleasant, but it still just information, like any other emotion. We are the architects of our wellbeing. We can start being curious about our experience of sadness today and begin the process of changing our relationship to it in the long-term. Sadness is simply a response to something we’ve been through (or are currently going through) and it is a way our body communicates our needs to us. Instead of trying to run from our sadness, we can lean into it and see what needs are being asked of us. It may be something as simple as rest and self-care, or perhaps we are desperate for support from our community, or perhaps some time alone to process and understand a difficult situation. Sadness is also just the frontman to a whole category of all kinds of different flavours of experience like grief, dissatisfaction, loneliness, disappointment, despair, hopelessness, regret, shame, embarrassment, etc. Knowing how to name our experience of sadness, in detail, is a way to acknowledge our experiences and validate them for ourselves. It is a way for us to be wholeheartedly seen and heard, which is a universal need for every human being on this planet. Trust your sadness. It is real and it is valid. You are the best source of knowledge for what you need to feel better. Take good care of yourself. --- Chapter 1: Emotional First Aid Kit Self-Love Navigating Anger Navigating Sadness Resilience --- BREATHING IS ACTION is a meditative affirmation podcast for teens and adults. For everyone, everywhere. Let's be the change we want to see in the world! Writing, research and production by: Macie Leblanc-Smith Editing by: Macie Leblanc-Smith, Marc-Olivier Plouffe Music: Serena by Bireli Snow on Epidemic Sound --- Find us on - Website: Instagram: Facebook: --- Listen on - YouTube: Spotify: Amazon Music: iHeart: /episode/index/show/afa121c5-475b-4d04-8908-3c91840e7bf9/id/34885660

Chapter 1: Navigating Anger 12/13/2024

Chapter 1: Self-Love 11/14/2024

Chapter 1: Emotional First Aid Kit 11/06/2024

Breathing is Action

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