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The problem was, the sources were hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years old. “And each way we breathe will affect our bodies in different ways.” Surely someone had studied the effects of this conscious breathing on landlubbers? I found a library’s worth of material. “There are as many ways to breathe as there are foods to eat,” said one female instructor who had held her breath for more than 8 minutes and once dived below 300ft. I went to Greece to write a story on freediving, the ancient practice of swimming hundreds of feet below the water’s surface on a single breath of air. Over that span of time, I fixed up my house, sorted myself out and got a lead that might answer some of my questions about breathing. But I worked to understand what had happened, and I spent the next several years trying to figure it out. I didn’t mention any of it to family members or friends. I returned to the breathing class the following week: same experience, fewer waterworks. What exactly had happened? How did sitting cross- legged in a strange house and breathing for an hour trigger such a profound reaction? This lasted a few days before the feeling faded out. The tension was gone from my shoulders and neck. The little things in life didn’t bother me as much. As advertised, there was a feeling of calm and quiet that I hadn’t experienced in a long time. The instructor approached and asked if I was OK, if I’d been sick or had a fever. But I had somehow sweated through my clothes as if I’d just run a marathon. Everyone had been covered in jackets and hoodies to keep warm. I looked down at my torso and noticed sweat blotches on my sweater and jeans. I ran my hand down my face, felt the sting of sweat in my eyes and tasted salt. I lifted my hand to wipe it off and noticed my hair was sopping. It happened in an instant.įresh approach: texts have focused on novel approaches to breathing for thousands of years. But it was as if I’d been taken from one place and deposited somewhere else. I never felt myself relax or the swarm of nagging thoughts leave my head. I wasn’t conscious of any transformation taking place. I thought about getting up and leaving, but I didn’t want to be rude. I started getting annoyed and a bit resentful that I’d chosen to spend my evening inhaling dusty air on the floor of an old Victorian house. No calmness swept over me, no tension released from my tight muscles.
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The voice instructed us to inhale slowly through our noses, then to exhale slowly. After a few months of living this way, I took my doctor’s advice and signed up for an introductory course in breathing to learn a technique called Sudarshan Kriya.Īt 7pm, the bushy-browed woman locked the front door, sat in the middle of the group, inserted a cassette tape into a beat-up boom box, and pressed play. I was in a rut– physically, mentally and otherwise. I was spending most of my time at home wheezing, working and eating three meals a day out of the same bowl while hunched over week-old newspapers on the couch. I’d just recovered from pneumonia, which I’d also had the year before, and the year before that. My job was stressing me out and my 130-year-old house was falling apart. I’d come here on the recommendation of my doctor, who’d told me: “A breathing class could help.” It could help strengthen my failing lungs, calm my frazzled mind, maybe give me perspective.įor the past few months, I’d been going through a rough patch. A blonde woman with an off-centre bindi on her forehead. I took a seat beside a window that rattled in the breeze and watched through jaundiced streetlight as others walked in. She asked me to take off my shoes, then led me to a cavernous living room, its ceiling painted sky blue with wispy clouds. When it swung open, a woman in her 30s with woolly eyebrows and oversize white teeth welcomed me inside. I walked through a gate, up a flight of creaking steps, and knocked on the door.
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T he place looked like something out of an old horror film: all paint-chipped walls, dusty windows, and menacing shadows cast by moonlight.