All We Have Is The Next Breath

There’s a simple, powerful invitation that I’ve been returning to lately—both in my personal life and in my work with others: just the next breath.

I’ve often encouraged coaching clients and officers to use breath as a grounding tool—to slow themselves down in moments of emotional intensity, conflict, or chaos. In law enforcement briefings, I’ve described the biology of it: how deep, intentional breathing activates the parasympathetic nervous system, signaling calm and safety rather than fight or flight. It reduces cortisol, slows the heartbeat, steadies the mind. It’s not just a mental exercise—it’s a physiological act of returning home to ourselves.

But this past week, I saw breathwork in its rawest, most elemental form.

I was called to the scene of the death of a two-month-old infant. I never saw the child, but I spent hours with the young mother—devastated, rocking on her bed, wrapped in a blanket, trying to survive the unbearable. We sat in silence for long stretches. Sometimes she wept. Sometimes she stared. Shock had fractured her connection to her body and to time itself.

At one point, another staff member came in—a woman in midlife who carried her own weathered strength. She told me she was a recovering addict, now working with this young mom in her own recovery journey. The two had built a fragile but growing trust.

This staff member put her arm around the grieving mother and spoke with gentle authority.

“I know that we tell you to focus on just today,” she said. “Just get through this day. But in moments like this, that doesn’t make sense anymore. When I lost my own child, I learned that there’s only one thing you can really do to get through something like this—and that’s the next breath. It’s all we have.”

Those words landed deeply for me. It’s all we have.

I realized how often I speak of breath as a practice to enhance performance—something that improves composure, awareness, or control. But in that room, I saw breath not as enhancement, but as survival. It wasn’t a tool added on top of our humanity; it was our humanity.

Later, when I thanked the woman for what she said, she smiled with the quiet knowing of someone who has lived what she speaks.

“Breathing is the only thing our body will do without us thinking,” she said. “And it’s the one thing we can choose to focus on and control when everything else is falling apart.”

Her words have stayed with me. They took me back to an old song from the church of my childhood—one that spoke of the divine as “the very breath I breathe.” That image feels fresh again. Breath as sacred presence. Breath as the invisible thread between survival and surrender.

The very next day, I was called to another sudden death—a 50-year-old husband and father. His family gathered in shock, looking to me for something that could make sense of what had just shattered their world. Their faces looked like people I know—people I love.

I didn’t have answers. But I remembered that woman’s wisdom from the day before. I took a deep breath and said quietly, “There’s really only one thing we have right now that can carry us to the next moment. Let’s start there—just the next breath.”

Together we inhaled and exhaled. Slowly. Once. Then again.

Over the next several hours—through tears, laughter, disbelief, and grief—I watched something remarkable. The teenage daughter, at one point, leaned toward her mother and whispered,

“Remember your breath, Mom. Remember your breath.”

It was a reminder to her mom, but also, I think, to herself—a way to hold on to something steady when the ground beneath her life had just given way.

Breath work, I’m realizing, is not a side practice to enhance our resilience—it is resilience. It’s the bridge between panic and presence, between collapse and continuation.

And sometimes, when we cannot find faith, when our words fail, when there’s nothing left to hold—

there is still the next breath.