Breathe: Underbelly Manifesto

It starts with our breath. That common, radical shared activity that sets the pace for our lives.

It demands that we attend to our bodies — our own and those around us. That we attend to and calmly notice our shared experience.

It then demands that we raise our expectations for ourselves and for those around us. This rise brings hope, the radical idea that we can do better, and that, with support, encouragement, patience, and love, we have done better, we do better, we will do better.

We thrive when we acknowledge our common humanity — we are all filled with the capacity for despair, hope, insanity, creativity, depravity, morality, rage and deep love.

The Underbelly requires that we take that first breath, that first step, looking deeply at our own inner selves and learning to love that which we felt was unloveable about us so that we will have the capacity to then love that which we thought was unloveable in others.