THE YOGA CHRONICLES: CONFESSIONS OF A RELUCTANT YOGI

“Breathless”

            I remember the waves crashing against me and my strength giving out. I remember my arms feeling like lead and my legs simply not working. I remember craning my neck to see how far I was from shore and the diving platform. I even remember going under and swallowing a mouthful of nasty lake water.

            But more than anything else, I remember that moment of utter panic when I realized I wasn’t going to make the swim from the boat dock to the diving platform. It was a physical shock which drove the breath from my lungs and paralyzed the rest of me.

            I was going to drown.

            I made it back up just long enough to see a red–suited lifeguard flying down the hill to the lake on the dead run and then entering the water in a full-on Mark Spitz racing dive. (Even his name was perfect: Paul Champion. It sounds like something the Southpark guys would dream up.)

The next thing I knew, I was being pulled up from under the surface and hauled ignominiously back to shore, a seven year-old weakling kid who couldn’t even make it to the diving platform.

It seems inconceivable but that was my first instinct, a wave of self–loathing that I had humiliated my brothers, my family and myself by being such a physical abortion. (The cruelty of my brothers’ teasing was often in direct proportion to whatever perceived shame I had visited upon them and, well, this was a doozy.) This was not just humiliation but a public humiliation and someone else–a lifeguard, for God’s sake- had to pull my ass out of the ditch. The taunts of their friends would burn their ears and I would pay the price in my tears and their disdain.

I know this sounds all very melodramatic.

It also happens to be true.

Not true in a sense.

True.

            There are those who would I say I am a man who cheated death that day and I should live each day as if it were my last.

Well, trust me on this one. That’s a load of shit.

            Far from acceptance of my own mortality and an invitation to embrace all the good in the world, this was an early object lesson in the assertion of my will:

This will by-God NEVER happen to me again. I will never feel this way again. I will live my life in such a way as to control each aspect of it, right down to people’s perceptions of me. No one will ever have to pull me out of the drink again. People won’t ever have to feel sorry for me again.

            Strangely, I didn’t even cry that day, even when I saw my mother’s hands pushing her not insignificant head of hair away from her forehead while bouncing on her tiptoes, a nervous gesture she generally reserves for births, surgeries, and close playoff games.

            Instead, I ran to the woods, squatted down, pulled my arms over my head in shame and held my breath, every fiber in my body tense and rigid to meet whatever blow would land on me.

Some scholars have called this the “fight or flight” instinct. Wrong. Take it from the youngest brother of three, there are times when you can’t fight or fly.

Sometimes you just curl up in a ball and take an ass-whipping.

            In those situations, you hold your breath to keep it from getting knocked out of you.

            Or you hold it so you won’t swallow lake water and drown.

 

            I smoked for twenty-seven years, which means I held my breath for about ten thousand hours between 1975 and 2002. (Do the math: a pack a day at twenty cigarettes per pack at five to six minutes per cigarette comes up to about an hour a day when accounting for inhaling and exhaling. Multiple that by 365 days a year for twenty-seven years. That’s 416 days.)

            I have also received over eighty jury verdicts in the last twenty-six years, which means I’ve heard that knock on the jury door eighty times. That too will knock the breath out of you.

            I have witnessed the birth of my son, preached in churches, stared down tavern –keepers and judges, ran a political campaign, been the victim of a violent crime, and coached in six basketball championship games.

            And I have fallen in love.

            Each one of these things will take your breath away.

            So yoga has its hands full.

 

We talk a lot about breathing in yoga, as if it is entirely new thing- which for me at least- I guess it is. We talk primarily about controlling the breath, as opposed to losing it. We talk about synchronizing our breath with our movements, trying to time our transition from one stage of a pose to the next with our breath in order to move ourselves in strong, mindful ways rather than flinging ourselves into poses.

We talk about “catching our breath,” another phrase I never truly understood until yoga.

When you are trying to move your body in syncopation with your breath, the breath can get behind movements and you try to literally catch up to your movements. I never really thought about that before yoga. It is essentially the same in running, when you speed up unmindfully to catch up with your opponent, leaving you gasping. This is why runners with a great “kick” have an advantage – they know when they are going to make their move and do so with purpose, i.e., in syncopation with their breath.

            I try to remember to breathe before I do anything now. Before I even lay down my yoga mat before class, I have to think about my breath. But like with anything else, the things you are trying not to do are generally more important than what you are actually trying to do.

            First, don’t hold your breath. Seems simple to people who didn’t smoke for twenty-seven years.

            Second, don’t breathe through your mouth. Breathe in through your nose and out through your nose as much as possible. Breathe into the diaphragm, not the lungs- much larger capacity. It will keep your heart rate from accelerating. You can control your heart rate this way rather than being reactionary.

Third, adjust your activity level to your breath. Breathe first. This is what Serena Williams is talking about when she says the tennis match looks to be “in slow motion.” What she means is that she is controlling her breathing. Her response to the pace of the action isn’t rushed or panicked. Instead, she is able to dictate it her own response and control the tempo of the match.

Also, time the length of your inhale with the length of your exhale. Try not to hesitate in between. Let it flow.

Finally, don’t beat yourself up for not breathing. You will fail.

            If your breath is regular and not panicked, your mind is clearer and you can concentrate more fully on the task at hand, like trying to figure out why you are trying to balance on one foot with your hands over your head in the first damn place.

            I breathe all the time now since starting yoga. I breathe at the grocery store, in my car, in Mass on Sunday, and sometimes I even breathe in court. I breathe on the golf course while putting, which allows me to control my heart rate. Three steady inhale and exhale breaths through my nose until my heart calms, I smile a bit to relax my face, and then I stroke the putt, which now goes only three feet past the cup as opposed to six.

            If I had known yoga at seven, I might not have almost drowned. I might not have panicked and I might have been able to roll onto my back and float until my breath regulated. I could’ve sent fresh oxygen to my lungs and to my brain, which would have relaxed me, allowed me to think clearly and then send a more soothing message onward to my flailing arms and legs.        

            If I remember to breathe now, I find myself much less likely to lash out in anger or frustration. I lean toward defensiveness in all things, whether ducking a punch and protecting myself from humiliation by adopting a cocksure, reactionary mask. The closer someone gets in discovering my disguise, the more defensive and flinty I tend to get. My reactions in those situations are rote in any event, owing less to the truth of my feelings than to the construction of a plausible public persona.

This is yet another learned behavior I often try to dismiss as an occupational hazard but the truth is this whole “never let ‘em see you sweat” thing is just another failed paradigm in my life.

The fact is there is nothing more obvious and sad than seeing a carefully crafted exterior crumble, whether it be a sweaty Wall Street –type doing the perp walk for insider –trading or a lawyer consumed by flop-sweat after making a closing argument fumble and trying to cover it up with even bigger words than the ones which failed him initially.

For me, it is as if my body has its own truth that I must accept. The moisture at my hairline tells me I was not prepared or thoughtful, a damnation of whatever petty falsity or disingenuousness I had concocted.

            I am a hare learning to be a tortoise, trying to accept that the difference between truthfulness and a brilliant disguise is often as simple as taking the time to breathe -and accepting the notion that people might actually like the person I am rather than the person I let them see.

© 2014 Thomas C. Barron