02/21/2025
The Stillness Between Breaths ~ by Heather Mullen
There was a time I ran from the silence, filled it with noise, filled it with motion,
afraid that in the stillness, I would see
what I had long buried beneath the weight of years.
But stillness, she is patient.
She waits in the hush between heartbeats,
in the spaces between thoughts,
in the gentle hush of wind through trees
where my name was whispered long before I learned to listen.
So I sat.
For the first time, I truly sat with myself.
I met the child I once was—
wide-eyed, tender, yearning to be seen.
She tugged at my sleeve and asked, “Do you remember me?”
I knelt, hands trembling, pressing my palm to her cheek.
And I whispered, “I see you now.”
She exhaled the breath she had held for so long,
the one she thought no one would notice missing.
I felt her settle into me, into my bones,
not lost, not abandoned—just waiting to be held.
And then, the storm of my teenage self arrived—
fierce, aching, eyes filled with the fire of defiance and pain.
She stood with arms crossed, daring me to reach for her.
Her voice cracked, sharp with wounds never tended.
“You left me,” she accused.
And I nodded, because she was right.
But I opened my arms anyway,
let her fall into me like she had always wanted to,
let her sob against the chest of the woman I had become,
until her walls melted, until she softened,
until she, too, found a home in my heartbeat.
I saw, then, the chains I had worn—
the old stories carved into my skin,
the programming that whispered, “You must be this. You cannot be that.”
I touched each one, felt their weight,
and with love—❤️🩹not anger, not regret—I unfastened them.
One by one, I let them fall to the earth.🌎
And in the space they left behind,
I found something unexpected—
not emptiness, not loss,
but me ❤️
The self I had been seeking was never missing.
She had been here all along, waiting for my return.
Not in the noise. Not in the running.
But in the sacred stillness of my own breath.
So now, I sit in silence and I listen.
Not out of fear, not out of need,
but because in this stillness, I am whole.
I am seen.
I am here.
I am home.
And as I rise, I do so lighter, softer—
not because I have been diminished,
but because I have let go of what was never mine to carry.
My shoulders no longer buckle under the weight of old stories.
My heart beats in a rhythm that belongs only to me.
I walk forward not as fragments of who I was,
but as the fullness of all I have been,
woven together with love, with truth, with knowing.
No longer searching. No longer waiting.
Just being.
And in this stillness, in this wholeness,
I finally understand—
I was never lost.
I was always becoming.
