Landing in the Unknown: How Breath Brings Us Home

I just got home from Croatia, where I went for a family wedding. It was beautiful, but getting there and back was something else entirely.

On the flight home, the man in front of me pushed his seat all the way back before we'd even lifted off. His headrest was practically in my face for the entire crossing of the Atlantic. I felt claustrophobic and annoyed; I had paid for extra leg room, and this was what I got? 

At some point, I got up to use the restroom and passed a man who was packed into a seat clearly built for someone much shorter, and I thought, "Okay. It's not that bad for me. I can do this.”

I reminded myself to breathe: A long inhale. A medium exhale. And again. 

I let the breath be a rhythm instead of a reaction. I let it remind my nervous system that this was temporary. The plane would land. I would get through.

Back at home, plagued with jet lag, wide awake at 4 am, I watched Michelle Obama's speech from the Obama Presidential Center dedication. As I listened, something in me just opened.

She said, "Hope is a choice."

I kept thinking about that word—choice—because it's easy to forget we have one. When we’re exhausted, when we’re disoriented, when everything in the outer world feels loud and frightening and out of our control, it doesn't feel like we have a choice. It feels like we’re just trying to survive the flight.

But what I know from years of working with breath is that the body always has a way through. Not around. Not over. Through.

The Rhythm That Carries Us

Jet lag is a strange thing. The body knows where home is, but it's been pulled out of sync with its own rhythms. The inner clock and the outer world are speaking different languages, and we’re stranded somewhere in between. Everything feels off. We’re tired but can't sleep. We’re home but don't feel like we’ve landed.

I think a lot of us feel this way right now—not because we've crossed time zones, but because the world we thought we knew keeps shifting beneath us. The disorientation is real. The exhaustion is real. And no amount of trying to think our way to clarity seems to help.

What does help is rhythm. Small, interior rhythm.

In WhaleBreathing, I often describe the breath as a wave. The inhale gathers like water pulling back from shore: building, filling, rising. The exhale releases like the wave meeting land; not crashing, just arriving, surrendering. And before the wave has fully settled, the next one is already forming. There's no empty pause. No frightening gap. Just continuous, rolling movement.

This is what the whales know. They've been moving through dark, pressurized depths for millions of years by becoming part of its rhythm. They surface, they breathe, they release, they descend. And when things get heavy, they don't abandon the water. They move through it differently.

We can do the same.

Finding Ground

My daughter is grown now, so I returned from my travels to a house that is quieter than I expected. I’ve filled the silence by talking to my dogs—a lot. And I've been sitting with what it means to be in a new chapter, one I didn't fully anticipate and can't entirely see the shape of yet.

There's a kind of permission we need to give ourselves in these moments. Permission to be in the unknown, to not have it figured out, to be disoriented without making that disorientation mean something terrible.

The breath helps me do that. When I'm in it—really in it, riding that wave—something in me settles and whispers: I'll be okay. I'll get through.

That is the quiet miracle of conscious breath. Not because it makes the world less complicated or the flight shorter. But because it returns us to ourselves, to the part of us that has been here before, that knows how to endure, that knows how to eventually land.

Michelle Obama called hope a spark. I'd call it a breath. Small, available, and always there when we remember to take it.

If you're feeling the weight of this strange, disorienting time in your body, I invite you to come breathe with me. WhaleBreathing is a practice designed for exactly this—for when you're exhausted, uncertain, and longing to feel like yourself again. We don't need all the answers. We just need to find our rhythm, and by doing so, we can land more fully in the present moment.