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. 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.
0 kommentar(er)
