Breath

Work, at least in the corporate sector can be incredibly harmful.  I had had lots of temporary and student jobs since I was fifteen but now I was in my mid to late twenties on my third “proper” job.  It was the first day. I liked my boss who was “hands-off”, straightforward and encouraging. The salary was better, the company was great in a cutting edge field.  I had a good position as a new consultant with very smart, experienced colleagues and lots of travel in the offing.  I was delighted to be there.  But there in the open plan office with my new laptop, an awful sickening feeling of dread crawled over me.  It felt like a heart attack.  I was embarrassed to have to go to A&E.  It turned out to be a panic attack which, being the nineteen nineties, I certainly did not admit to at the office.

Some years later I was suffering from depression and work-related stress in a different job I had had to take but reluctantly because the boss was manic, profoundly controlling and toxic.  I went to the GP probably in the first week not so much for any of this but because my heart felt like it was constantly jumping right under my skin. 

Luckily and only because I had private health insurance I was sent to a Harley Street doctor, which was the street next to where I was living at the time.  He was some kind of psy doctor. I notice you don’t breathe, he observed, surprising me. You should try to remember to breathe.  I noticed it too. At the time I was also plagued with pain across the upper back and shoulders. 

In a class yesterday a nervous woman was talking about the confusion she experienced from different teachers telling her how to move her body.  Probably time to step back from the teachers, said the teacher, sensibly. And don’t forget to breathe! I added. I meant it light-heartedly to dispel the tension, but it is true because when you get that wound up and confused about things, that is exactly what happens.

I don’t know if it was around the time of the jumping heart that I learned there was a kind of breathing people do that is from the belly but at some point I did become aware of this concept.  Lots of people breathe this way naturally.  I knew I did not do this but I had absolutely no concept of what it was or how to do it.  

The same thing happened often in tango dance class when the teachers would talk about “being grounded” or “having intention”.  What on earth did these things mean? How were you meant to do them and how did you know if you were doing it right? Nearly everything I was told to do in dance class felt awkward and unnatural - where to put your face, how to hold and place your chest, the stretching back of the woman's leg, all of this "technique" and more combination, never mind the actual moves. And then there were the men in class who felt too creepy or too old or both or who criticised you for doing it wrong. How I lasted through a couple of years I think was only because the teachers were quite fun, I danced socially a lot and travelled.

Try as  I might I could not do belly breathing.  I did not associate it with stress.  I just thought I was physiologically different and forgot about it.  Actually, the breath must have been trapped somewhere much higher up. It was years, long after leaving corporate work before I noticed I was belly breathing.  The other day I noticed I can feel as though I can bring my breath down to my tailbone if I so wish. The breath alone can sometimes literally reduce or remove some tensions in the body. It was an astonishing discovery. I don’t know why all children or perhaps adolescents aren’t routinely taught these techniques.

Sometimes they are. My elder son has always been very calm.  I asked him once, as quite a young child in primary school, how he managed to avoid letting any fracas upset him.  I go to a quiet room, he said, and count to ten or backwards from ten. It was a “resilience” technique he had been taught in school.

At a recent milonga I had the great food fortune to chat for the first with any real meaning with the non-dancing partner of someone I had known for many years. I was vaguely aware that the partner had been a personal trainer and was now I think a pilates teacher.  I knew he was into fitness in some way. He looked much younger than his real age. He said he now tended not to take on very young clients. I may accidentally misrepresent this but I think it was because what they wanted was different to older clients whose needs were more aligned with what the teacher considered important. 

During the performances we started talking about politics, the state of the world, but talked of many things.  I sensed someone wise. I particularly remember him talking about the importance of the breath.  Breathing is the first thing we do and the last thing we do, he said. And of course it’s the one thing we must do through every minute of our lives.

In recent crisis and unable to free myself from unhelpful worries I turned to meditation again.  Not finding one of the guided meditations quite what I wanted, I recorded my own using my own insights, experience and intuition together with elements of those notions I had found useful in guided meditations by others.  I have done this several times now.  Naming them afterwards I realise they are almost like incantations, spells: meditation for acknowledging your current state and creating calm, meditation for sleep, meditation to dispel intrusive thoughts.  They all focus around the breath and have the most extraordinary transformative effect on lowering heart rate by up to thirty beats per second by changing a mindset from fearful, worried and dark to optimistic, light, calm and energised.  The ability to effect such great change in a mere twenty minutes or half hour simply by breath, by remaining in the present moment and by words is profoundly empowering.