#137 - Learning How To Breathe

or: this thing that i had been doing incorrectly my entire life

Three years ago I read a book about how breath works that turned me into a full-time nosebreather.

It's a pop science book and I definitely didn't believe every word he said, but it was extremely effective within just the first two chapters. I decided to try and stay conscious of my breath as I moved throughout the world.

Which I found it hard to do at first – especially because my nose wasn't...good at breathing. I didn't use it for that purpose a lot, the muscles in there were not strengthened. I wasn't getting better breaths than I was through my mouth but I also knew I never would if I didn't stick with it.

The book is called, say it with me now, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor. Go get it at your local bookstore, used online, or better yet – a library (or the libby app on your kindle)! It's a good book but I don't think it's a need to reread kind of book. I got most of what I got out of it in the first two chapters.

(This isn't one of those books where the premise only takes the first two chapters to explain and then the rest is filler because it's far more impressive to publish a book than a blog but like did we need 320 pages on Atomic Habits or was that one like pretty much explained in the first 3,200 words? But the breath book is really convincing in it's opening arguments and once I started implementing breath work, the personal results were evident, but the book itself I did finish I've just never been tempted to go back.)

I will say, I didn't go as far as taping my mouth closed at night, because people have died from doing that and I read The Darwin Awards too many times as a child (it was The Book In The Bathroom for our family) so I tend to actively avoid situations that feel like both a choice and that would force someone to try and not laugh when relaying the cause of death. (Dane Cook's "Tire To The Face" bit from 2002 probably didn't help with the crystallization of this belief in my adolescent brain.)

(You know who does heavily encourage their staff to use mouthtape? New York City Cop-pretending-to-be-a-Mayor Eric Adams. Please go read this bonkers New Yorker piece about him because I need as many people as possible to know just how insidious and weird this man is!! And no his mandate of breath work for public school kids doesn't make up for his insistence on defunding everything except the NYPD and lying and being a petty little loser all the time.)

I've been much more consistent about movement this year. Both in terms of finding workouts that I like doing (shoutout to the 8lb dumbbells my best friend got me for Christmas (last year) (it's never too late for now!)) and a new full length mirror for changing the game in terms of my routines) and just making sure I left the house everyday and took a little toodle around the block. Working out is easier for me now that I do it correctly.

When the video instructors (separate essay on all the ways I use YouTube in my life coming soon) tell me to "breathe into [body part]" or "focus on my breath to get through these last few seconds" I actually know what they mean and can do that. I've never been this in shape in my adult life, and it's because it's always been incredibly hard to make enough progress. By the time I developed a thing, life would get in the way.

And also, I was living excuse to excuse – didn't want to give anything up to make time for it, I had an aversion to showering for years that I didn't come to terms and/or make the necessary changes around until recently so I would subconsciously resist getting sweaty, it was difficult and I was ashamed of my lack of athleticism, my inner monologue would become incredibly cruel which was debilitating when it came to motivating myself to do it the next day, people would get competitive with me in a way that made me feel annoyed and squandered my enjoyment, and uh it's often annoying to do/plan around and I didn't really want to incorporate it all that badly tbh because I was deeply uninterested in my own well-being.

Then, the breathing thing changed, which was huge. And then I said, "Most people are living excuse to excuse." aloud mid work conversation and felt like a hypocrite because "most people" certainly included me and oh baby I hate feeling that way so much I was actually willing to radically shift a bunch of my most self-destructive habits!

Including beginning to earnestly like myself enough to care about Future Me.

I used to put so. much. responsibility. on Future Me. That ephemeral future-version would be responsible for suddenly having better habits, for doing the dishes I didn't want to do, for meeting crunch deadlines because I couldn't be bothered to motivate myself without external pressures. And I wasn't giving that girlie any help or support.

I wasn't looking out for her teeth, her joint & mobility health, her quality of life. I was just making her to-do list longer because I was – well, first I was busy repressing pain, then I was busy hitting rock bottom, then I was busy recovering & healing, then I was busy reeling from the shame and grief that came with healing, and then I finally started taking my life seriously and understood my own inherent responsibilities to myself and internalizing the scope of influence I had in terms of making it what I wanted it to be.

Learning how to breathe again made me realize just how many things in my life I had never taken the time to learn how to do correctly.

It's the most basic thing we do, and we do it all the time and we do it without thinking. And since I was suddenly talking about breath all the time, I came to an awareness that almost no one had ever learned how to breathe correctly. It was just kind of assumed we all knew how and had good habits around it.

It's weird that breath work is considered woo-woo. I'm fascinated by all the stuff we can make our bodies do. Talk about untapped potential what do you mean I can make myself feel super calm if I just breathe in silence for a little while? (It's akin to the miracle of masturbation, what do you mean there's a pleasure center that I have free and full access to whenever I want? How do I sleep so well at night? I smoke weed and jerk off. Fool proof! OH and breathing is also a huge part of making sex better, because of course it is it's fundamental to all life!!!! Of course it is! Tantra used to get mocked in every single 90s sitcom but those folks were always coming at the end of the scene so who was the butt of that joke again??? The nerds who took pleasure seriously? At least they're getting off!!)

The nose is more closely connected to our genitals than any other organ. It is covered in that same tissue. So when one area gets stimulated, the nose will become stimulated as well. Some people have too close of a connection where they get stimulated in the southerly regions, they will start uncontrollably sneezing. And this condition is common enough that it was given a name called honeymoon rhinitis.

James Nestor during his interview on NPR's Fresh Air (don't want to read the book? Just listen to/read this!)

I started bringing breath into my day-to-day life a lot more. I focused on getting used to breathing through my nose while on walks. When I'm tapped in and aware, I also like to focus on my posture because I have a baaad habit of tilting my pelvis back and that was causing lower back aches.

As I got better at breathing I managed to enter deeper states during meditation (way more fun, kept me hooked on doing that). I got my sister to read the book so we started incorporating a quick yoga video and a seven minute meditation together every morning at work during work hours, and now when things get overwhelming we take five deep breaths (recently during one of these I invented an "intangibles" section for business proposals and one day that idea will be mainstream how dare we only focus on artifacts instead of experience, we must expand our understanding of value!). My anxiety is at an all-time low right now due to a whole host of circumstances and bolstered by my ability to regulate with my breath.

Letting myself re-learn what felt like an obvious skill opened me up to investigating what other actions I did by default.

Which helped me to stop being ashamed of my personal timeline and shift into being grateful that I had arrived when I did. Sure, it took me longer to get here, but that didn't ruin the view? Who was I trying to impress? Who was I hoping to get a gold star from for Being Good At Coping Instead of Living?

I was so obsessed with other people's perceptions of myself I had never bothered to focus on what my perception of myself was. Which like, seems ironic since I write personal essay's, but actually turning oneself into a literal character in a story is a great way to feel like you have a clear sense of self while continuing to meticulously dictating the way others would/could view you. Feels a little like on-purpose puppet master to admit that, but I wasn't aware that's what was happening at the time. I didn't realize that I was trying to control my own narrative so hard that I had externalized any understanding of my motivations. Everything was to impress other people, which left no time to interrogate what I actually found impressive about myself. What talents I was proud of vs. the ones I leaned into because of seeking praise. What had gotten lost because of my early rejection and perceived lack of safety in Not Being Immediately Good?

Honestly, the breath book was the first thing I read after My Big Breakup and it's come to feel like the book was a big red reset button that allowed me to start my whole approach to life over. Ground up. Nostrils, uh, first.

That was like two years ago.

Last week, I went to my first breath work class. And it! was! really terrible!

I had started writing this essay and when I saw my local yoga studio was hosting a class, I thought the class would be a fun evolution of my practice to discuss and really put a button on my whole journey.

But mmmmm, well, then I went.

It took me a while to figure out what was so awful about the class and ultimately it comes down to a failure of facilitation on the instructors part. (Now that I'm aware of facilitation minutiae I can't unsee it. And bad facilitation is everywhere!)

Even though the class itself was awkward, weird, energetically upsetting, and ultimately a waste of both time and money on a Saturday night, I'm actually still glad I went. I'm glad I had an experience, even if it was a bad one. I went and was vulnerable and tried something new and spent a few hours giving my more woo-woo nature some enrichment.

And it reaffirmed that I don't need to do this with other people for it to be effective. I think class settings are often not my preferred environment when doing energy and healing work. Even yoga classes – they tend to flare the competitive edges of my personality that don't exist when I'm doing it solo. The one adjustment I get on my child's pose (it's never any other pose, which like, lol) isn't making the spiritual misalignment I experience in those spaces worth it.

That's a me thing, btw! I think there are a ton of positives that other people get out of going to classes. But I think I often don't think of my life as "real" until I perform it in front of others and that's what often motivated me to go. It's wasn't because of accountability, it was because I've needed to exist in front of others and demanded being witnessed in order to verify my own beliefs about my actions. And while community is important (very pro-community and doing things with others in general!), I needed to develop the skills of self-affirmation.

I didn't need a class to assert that the efforts have been real. That the changes are compact but constant so the tower got built brick by brick without anyone even paying attention to the project in particular.

I had solved a root problem.

The quality of breath directly correlated to overall quality of life.

Working out got easier when I was breathing correctly. Correcting my posture came naturally because I was using my diaphragm again. Recovery time after traversing the three flights of subway stops at Bedford was halved, which made it easier for me to exist without embarrassment in public. (Which allowed me to analyze the embarrassment feelings in a real way rather than push through them and lie to myself about the factors of socialization & life experiences that led me to constantly feeling like others were going to point and laugh at me when my actions felt like the assumed consequences of being fat.)

It doesn't matter that I hadn't been doing it right. It only mattered that once I realized that, I cared enough to learn how to do it better.

Breath, baby!!! Foundation of life!! Bedrock of existence typea stuff! Without breath we are not alive! It's a uniting factor! It keeps us grounded! It's the thing to go back to the second we feel out of control because we can always control our breath (even though we don't have to how cool is that?)!

We're alive we're alive! Breathe it in, we're alive.