Every breath I take is a new me

GAUTAMA BUDDHA

Studying hard for an A in math, doesn’t make you an A student forever. This is easy for us to understand intellectually, yet in our daily lives, we either want our successes to last OR feel that our past mistakes are irrevocable – we become the error of our ways with no hope for change.

Consider this: we take approximately eight million breaths annually. If we were to internalize Buddha’s quote we will recognize that there are countless “new yous” in a given year.

Marshall Goldsmith has coined the term ‘the Every Breath Paradigm’. “There is a great Western disease,” Marshall says, “of, “I’ll be happy when…” It is the pervasive mindset whereby we convince ourselves that we’ll be happy when we get that promotion, or drive a Tesla, or finish a slice of pizza. When we finally get what we’re after, immediately we begin striving for the next thing. And the next. We are living in what Buddha called the realm of the ‘hungry ghost’, always eating but never satisfied. We are not a unitary mass of flesh and bone and emotions and memories, but rather a steadily expanding multitude of individuals, each one time stamped in the moment of our most recent breath—and reborn with every breath.”

When he is coaching clients and they beat themselves up over a recent or old blunder, he says “Stop,” and then asks them to repeat the following: “That was a previous me. The present me didn’t make that blunder. So why am I torturing myself for some past error that the present version of me didn’t commit?”  

Then he has them repeat: “Let it go.”

As silly as this routine may sound, it works. Clients not only begin to see the futility of belaboring the past, but they also embrace the psychically soothing notion that the blunder was committed by someone else—a previous self. They can forgive that previous self and move on.

The difficulty lies when the previous self did something spectacular. We need to use Goldsmith’s Every Breath Paradigm there too, and recognize that we are only a success, in the moment of the successful act. Then we have to do it again.

We may see this more easily if we are looking outwards…say at a boss or colleague who clings to their past triumphs as proof that they don’t need to change their behaviour to produce more of the same. “I’m not so bad…look at what I’ve done. How come I’m so successful?”

More painful might be the executive terminated because of a downsize, a former CEO, or athlete, all struggling to create their next life. They may talk constantly about past triumphs, winning the gold medal or their stellar leadership when they took the company out of the red into the black. That was then. This is now.

Thinking along these lines is not meant to minimize our achievements but to recognize the impermanence of everything. We will always have the memory of being fulfilled, reaching our goal, achieving what we set out to. The point here is that we can’t hold on to it, or package it or try to recreate it exactly as we did in the past. Wallowing in memories of who we were or what we accomplished will not carry us forward. We need to act in the moment as the person we are today, and keep on doing that moment by moment, day after each consecutive day.

We are never truly finished until we are finished, that is – when we stop breathing.

If you are resting on past glories, sitting on your laurels so to speak, it’s time to reawaken to your power in this present moment, and embrace the flexible, mutable parts of you. To do otherwise is to the detriment of all, who will be robbed of your ever evolving giftedness and service to the world.