Breathing through anxiety

Greetings from Lake Placid, NY! I just drove up this morning for the weekend, to visit my step-daughter, Elin. It is good to be up here, enjoying the cooler temps and the beautiful water. Our friend, Charlie, has wonderful cabins up here, and we bring the dogs and settle in quite nicely. You have got to see his garden!!! It is magnificent! I warned Charlie that I am a temporary vegan, as I stood salivating over his kale, mustard greens, arugula and radicchio. I will be helping myself to a salad, you can be certain!

I wanted to say a few words about stress, anxiety and breathwork. I have been making a real conscious effort to disperse stress as it arises, andI’m in the process of teaching myself to automatically go into “de-stress breathing” when I feel my day start to spin out of control (which it does quite regularly at the office!)

I have been reading “Eat Love Pray” by Liz Gilbert– and I am loving this book. I am particularly fond of her experiences with meditation. In the midpart of her book, her yogi introduces her to mantras- phrases that you focus on as you try to quiet your mind. I really liked this idea of mantras, as it gives an already overactive mind something to concentrate on. I started practicing focusing on my breath by reciting the mantra, “ham- sah” (I may be spelling this wrong), the “ham” on the inhale, the “sah” on the exhale. I like it. In fact, yesterday at work, I was totally fried by lunchtime—wait a minute: what lunchtime? And I felt my neck just start to tighten and I wasn’t breathing. I shifted my focus to the breathing/mantra exercise, and almost immediately I felt a bit of release. I practiced this several times during that day, and I believe it did make a difference. As I keep doing it, I expect to have a better response, and I will let you know how it goes.

In the meantime, try it out for yourself. When you feel your stress levels rising, take a nanno second and see if you are breathing. Seriously. WIth stress, we have a tendency to either hold our breaths or to only breath short shallow breaths. Unlock your jaw and breathe in through your nose fully into your belly, and then slowly breathe it out. Choose a mantra if you like to help you focus on something more than your breath- try the word “peace” or whatever appeals to you. No one even has to know what you are doing: just say the word or phrase to yourself. Watch what effect it has.

Know that we may not be able to avoid a lot of the stress that comes our way each day, but we can affect how we react to it. I hope that in time I can learn to diffuse stress and let it roll off of me so that it doesn’t have a negative impact on my health. I hope you will, too.

Peace,

Diane