Yesterday I was at a grrrl gang open mike event in Berlin and met a young woman named Bella.
I‘m currently collecting questions about breathing and after chatting for a while I asked her if she had a question for me. Rather than asking a straightforward question, Bella told me that she has a heart condition and that is very sensitive to the influence of internal and external stress because her heart immediately reacts. She tried to describe how she felt about being in her body, the experience and the knowledge of her heart not working properly and not being there for her the way it naturally would be. „I feel like I can‘t trust myself“, she said. Her body needed a backup plan, a pacemaker that took over when her heart couldn‘t regulate itself.
After she‘d told me this about herself, she thought for a moment and then said that she was interested in the correlation between stress and breathing.
This is a very common question but I didn‘t feel like giving one of a host of standard answers to Bella. What she‘d told me about her heart reminded me of how I‘ve often felt about the breath. Ideally, the breath would accompany and support me, non-conditionally, 24/7, at all times. When I‘m anxious or furious or depressed, the breath would not only be there but move through me regularly as if to say „there, there, all is well, I‘m here for you.“
I‘d always thought „wouldn‘t it be great if the breath would behave like that? But it doesn‘t. In a way it is like a good mother who is present with her baby, mirroring her, reflecting her every emotion and sensitivity. Breathing is first and foremost adaptive, so when I‘m anxious or furious, or depressed, my breathing reflects that.
I, too, can be like a good mother to myself and try to remedy the situation and alleviate discomfort. As a somatic bodyworker, I use the different tools I‘ve learned over the years or develop new ones to regulate myself. They help to a greater or lesser degree. I try to position or move like this and that, and if I lose patience with myself, I can always use a breathing technique. The respiratory system, being voluntary as well as involuntary, makes it possible that I can, to some extent, guide and control my breathing. A breathing technique for me is like an emergency measure, an intervention whereby I do away with communication and negotiation and use my will to take over. In my experience, sometimes even that doesn‘t work or only to a certain extent and I feel at the mercy of my nervous system, my emotions, or my breath, knowing they all synchronise with each other.
So, I really resonated with what Bella told me. We had more of a dialogue than a breathing session which was fitting since we were sitting on a bench in a pub, having a beer together. „I didn‘t answer your question“, I said, but Bella reassured me. We agreed that our exchange had given us both a lot to reflect on and explore. And before I could offer an answer to her question, the readings for the evening started.