Some thoughts on breathing

Back in January I started seeing a hilot binabaylan, a traditional Filipina healer. At our first session my healer performed a ritual called tawas sa papel using paper soaked with coconut oil (which she processed herself in Hawaii!) that I held in my hands with intention before she placed it over a flame to see what symbols or images would reveal themselves. I understood what was there immediately and have since carried the oily little paper around with me like a totem to guide and ground me.

My healer also pressed a pointed wooden stick into the pads of each of my fingers and toes. Each digit corresponds to a natural element, though now I can't remember which goes with which.

"Pressure is normal, expected, but tell me if you register any other sensations," she said.

There was sharpness and discomfort when she pressed into my middle fingers and second toes.

"Hmm, yes...You don't take very deep breaths."

"I can take deep breaths!," I countered, defensive for, oh, absolutely no reason.

"I'm not saying you don't take deep breaths. I'm saying that, in general, you take shallow breaths. I noticed when you walked in, the whole time you've been here."

I can honestly say that the shallowness or depth of my autonomic breathing is not something I had ever thought about.

"People who take shallow breaths are sometimes guarded or self-protective..."

"Well, yes. I'm always waiting for the other shoe to drop." (My duh implied.)

"Okay. So what might it be like to let yourself take in more air, breathe more deeply?"

A thought shot up through me instantaneously like a metal rod: I have zero idea how to even begin doing this. But then I paused (new to me) and realized it's literally just breathing and maybe I can just start consciously paying attention to it and trying?

What that has looked like over the last few months:

• Lying across my foam roller, laid horizontally on the carpet and positioned just below my shoulder blades, while watching basketball in the evenings. Navigating the initial panic that hits when I do this and trying to take slow, even breaths.

• Re-familiarizing myself with my diaphragm, which I had a stronger relationship with when I was performing in high school musicals and playing the clarinet. Watching my midsection, which I feel self-conscious about the girth of, distend as I inhale. Saying hi to and thanking my waist (humbling) before pushing my breath back out.

• Realizing that 6+ months of chiropractic adjustments has far from cured my shoulder and lower back pain, but has better acquainted me with my thoracic spine (which has always felt kind of like a spinal dead zone), allowing me to sense its borders and the space it and my lungs occupy.

• Stretching, dancing into, activating, moving that spinal dead zone.

I turned in the final manuscript of my memoir on April 6.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

At my annual mammogram three days later, I stood topless, save for the medical blue snap-front poncho (now unsnapped) resting on my shoulders. My left arm was fully extended, hand gripping the top of the mammo machine, as instructed. A kind and extremely competent woman wrested my left breast onto a flat surface, then smooshed it down with the clear plastic compressor. (Side note: I love mammogram technicians, including my sister-in-law Amy, and consider them leaders in the "if you want something done, give it to a ______" genre of humans.)

After handling my breast like a cold chicken cutlet (complimentary), she walked the two feet to the control panel to begin taking the actual images.

"Okay, deep breath in. Aaaaaand," she said, her cossetting voice turning stern, "DON'T BREATHE DON'T BREATHE DON'T MOVE."

I heard and felt the giant machine buzz and x-ray my breast – all the way down (across?), then all the way back. It reminded me of the sound my personal Canon desktop scanner makes as it scans my many W9s each year during tax season.

"Okay NOW breathe."

My exhalation startles me, like I'm pretty sure it originated somewhere around my uterus. Deeper in my body than I am used to feeling.

A small celebration: I've learned – or am beginning and continuing to learn – this "deeper breath" thing. It's a powerful sensation, adjacent to relief, but with possibly more layers of relief and loosening to discover underneath.

An uh-oh: riding on that outward breath was the understanding that writing a memoir has been a very good way for me to process life events and patterns, even begin to heal from them AND (OOPS) that it is also a very distinct form of compartmentalization.

It's probably not a big surprise that I have a tendency to over-intellectualize nearly everything in my life. It's part what makes me a good thinker and writer, but it's also a crutch, and, specific to me, a dangerous habit. When I am overwhelmed (not in good way) or experiencing negative emotions and self-talk, I think, think, and overthink all the reasons why – real and imagined – this is happening. I force my feelings to make sense, not trusting that my feelings don't have to make sense, or that simply feeling them, sitting in them, expressing them, or just letting them play out will reveal what I need to know. If I am having trouble doing this, I like to numb the sensations with substances, something I did consistently for 20+ years.

Writing is a very good way to compartmentalize emotions, to almost think them out of existence in service of an artful sentence, a well-written book. An eminently justifiable practice of suppression.

"Oh god," I say, as the technician approaches to handle my right boob.

"Excuse me?," she says.

"Oh sorry, nothing. I mean, sorry, I didn't mean to say that out loud."

Oh god, I continue within my own brain now. Now I have to go back to just living and feeling.

I'm happy to report it now takes me less time (a mere 21 days since the exhalation to writing this) to realize it's okay, it's literally just living and feeling.