Try a Sigh

Here's a simple strategy for working through the strong emotions of these painful days.

Jan 26, 2025

Sunset over the ancient city of Bayt Natif, as seen last week during our first open foraging walk of the season. (See more pics below)

Dear Healthy Jew,

As the hostages trickle home, with scores still left behind for now, I frequently feel overwhelmed with pain, anger, fear, tension, and confusion. Sometimes I tear up a bit, but usually I’m not a very good crier.

Instead, I often I sigh deeply, on purpose, with awareness. I’ve been sighing a lot in the past almost 15 months, about the mind-numbing death, destroyed families, and displaced communities, all happening basically down the road from where I live in Bet Shemesh, Israel. I find it helps process the feelings.

Although sighing is less dramatic and verbal than sobbing and wailing, it’s extremely effective in its own way, especially when done on purpose with awareness.

Challenging emotions build up inside our bodies and minds, tightening and closing us up. The tension builds, and without realizing it we might strengthen our grip every day.
By stopping to sigh, we consciously let go of pent up tension, sending it off to the world in a breath of life going out. Then we can open up to the next breath entering, perhaps with a bit more freedom than before.

Breath is life itself; sighing is facing the pain in life and letting it go.

The Exodus began with a sigh:

The Israelites sighed from the slavery and cried out, and their pleading rose to God… and God remembered the covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. (Exodus 2:23-24)

Sighing is the earliest stirrings of the cry-prayer that I first wrote to you about 2 weeks after October 7, 2023. (The post later grew into Chapter 14 of my book, Land of Health: Israel’s War for Wellness.) This prayer isn’t the sober ritual of crowning God as King every day, but the desperate cry for help when we’re in trouble and we know that only God can save us. And it begins with a sigh - the active expression of helpless anguish.

Until we sigh, we might think that we can somehow fight or scream the situation into being different than it is right now. By sighing, we give up, allowing God and His world to enter and take over the show of life that we can’t manage ourselves.

So next time you’re feeling worried, stressed, or worked up about the unfolding crisis and its fallout - or about anything in life - try sighing, on purpose, with awareness. Take a deep breath in, hold it just a moment, and then let it go. Don’t push or blow it out: just let it go, all by itself, easy and simple.

Our sighing won’t change anything immediately. But it might just be the beginning of our salvation.

Thank you for reading Healthy Jew.

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