Remedial Breathing

Well, my panic attacks reached epic proportions last week. After two months, I finally got fed up. Yep, that's me, willing to ignore the pink elephant in the room until it sits on me. Actually, I just couldn't take the tingly limbs and exhaustion anymore. After some research into anxiety/ panic attacks (see here) I realized I have been hyperventilating for the last 2 months. I thought you had to be loud and gasping to hyperventilate. You know, head between your knees, breathing into a brown paper bag type of scenario. Apparently, short rapid breaths qualifies. Unfortunately this has become my regular breathing style. Mostly because I am always in a state of panic. So, I entered remedial breathing.

My sweet hubby bought me a book called Breathe! You are alive. At first I thought he was making a joke but as it turns out it is a wonderful book. It has breathing meditations in it, which are helping tremendously, but it is also enlightening me in other ways.

For example, "Our feelings are us. If we do not look after them, who will do it for us. Every day, we have painful feelings, and we need to learn to look after them." and "When we survey our territory, we also find destructive traits, such as anger, despair, suspicion, pride, and other mental formations that cause us suffering. Because we do not like to look at these negative traits, we do not want to come back to ourselves. But with the aid of the practice of mindful breathing, we learn to take full responsibility for restoring our territory and taking good care of it." Wow, you mean I am suppose to deal with negative thoughts and feelings? I didn't think Christians were allowed to have those. What do you mean ignoring them isn't healthy???

And so, I am in remedial breathing. Learning again not only to breathe (not as easy as it sounds) but to look at, understand, accept and move forward with my negative thoughts and feelings. Looking at them allows me to see which ones are random negativity (didn't know I had so much floating around in there) and which are issues needing to be prayed over, acted on, communicated. Breathing is getting better. I am more at peace. Definitely making a better day for the boys.

Last night hubby got some stressful news. I haven't been breathing well again today. And so, I'm off to breathe and contemplate what I am so afraid of. Learning, slowly but surely.