How to Use the Breath to Transform Pain, Stress and Anxiety

Breathing is something we do automatically. But, did you know that most people only use 20% of their breathing capacity (10% of their brain capacity, and who knows how much of their heart capacity)? How can you access the other 80% – and have fun doing so?

Improved breathing capacity can:
· Strengthen your immune system
· Increase metabolic rate (which can help with weight loss)
· Equalize blood pressure
· Cleanse your body of waste materials
· Allow your body to use oxygen more efficiently to improve health
· Calm and steady your mind
· Increase lung capacity
· Provide your brain with more oxygen, improving concentration and emotional balance

All of us experience stress, fear and anxiety from the challenges we face – whether we are dealing with pain, loss, illness, or adversity. Our bodies tighten, our minds become frozen with fear, and the anxiety makes us want to flee. Learning and practicing breathing skills can make a dramatic difference in the quality of our lives.

Sometimes we have to touch the edge of the unknown to create art, go into the deep end of ourselves to generate more happiness, and recycle our own pain to make love real.

Pain, stress, and anxiety – the nemesis of happiness – are feelings you can count on encountering on a daily basis. But, people deal with them in different ways. Some are good at enduring it, others freak out at the mention of it, and some are oblivious to it and deny it altogether. Another word for pain, stress and anxiety is suffering. Suffering is very unpopular in our culture, although it’s been around forever. Suffering is a downer – especially mental or emotional suffering. It makes one seem weak and too vulnerable in a culture where everyone wants to look good. People have no patience for it. No one wants to be around a depressed person.

‘Coming out’ with depression is big now; it is akin to coming out as being gay in the 70's. One reason coming out about depression is so popular is because it has hit the mainstream. It’s one thing when your children, parents, best friend, spouse or co-worker are depressed. But, when your favorite celebrity reveals that he felt suicidal while making his last movie, or that she is now taking prescribed medication because she wanted to drive her car into a wall and kill her children due to post partum depression – now, you know it is acceptable to admit to having depression.

By the same token, there is an increased understanding and appreciation in our über-connected world of how cultural differences can influence our ability to endure and express our pain. Terror and violence are misdirected and extreme expressions of pain. This suffering, coupled with feelings of alienation and disrespect, can induce a person go off the deep end and create destruction and more pain.

No one – not the celebrity with the million-dollar paycheck, not the terrorist whose anger flares under impoverished conditions, not the commuter who seethes when someone cuts him off in traffic – is immune to the daily suffering of being human.

Always, there were two things I loved and hated about life: I loved joy and hated emotional pain. I am someone who – without joy – is good for nothing. I thrive on the simple pleasure of being alive which comes for no reason, other than breathing, and which I have learned to appreciate more than anything in life. If this joy in not accessible to me I lose my reason for being. This is especially true if it is accompanied by the pain of depression: a combination of dread, unrelenting worrying, despair and unstoppable anxiety.

I have been around the block with a variety of approaches to depression – both mainstream and alternative – and different things worked and didn't work for me at different times. But nothing has been more thrilling in its simplicity and accessibility than the discovery of the breath.

I was already a spiritual teacher and meditation practitioner for 20 years when I had a severe episode of depression in 2003. This one didn't respond to anything I did before that had worked, including anti-depressing medication and three E.C.T treatments.
I was at my wits end when I met an integrative psycho-pharmacologist who prescribed a yogic breathing technique called Sudarshan-kriya. Within one month of practicing this technique I was free of depression, back to my jovial self.

What transpired over the past four years since this recovery is miraculous in and of itself. While continuing to practice the breathing technique on a daily basis, and teaching it to my students and clients, mindful breathing has taken on a life of its own. It became integrated into my spiritual practice as the main focus: reconnecting to Being and the cultivation of Presence.

I learned to use the breath to fill the hurtful cracks of my ego with love and spaciousness. I have discovered that my suffering stems from cracks in my egoic pain-body, and nothing is more compassionate, more responsible and more healing than to recycle my pain with love through using the breath and grounding it in my body. When I ‘drop’ from the head, breathe from the core, and am in a more grounded state, I am able to investigate my thoughts and find the clarity that I otherwise have no access to. It is also creative and fun. I often find myself dancing with joy at the miracle of being alive.

When an unexpected life event happens – the loss of a loved one, a decline of health, the breakup of a relationship– it can challenge, provoke, and trigger us out of the flow of the present. We tend to either shut down or suppress the fear and hurt that come up, or overreact and act out. We often feel stuck, not knowing what to do, how to contain the pain or how to move through the fear. When we identify ourselves with the circumstances of our lives, we tend to lose our authenticity.

All this and more came up for me with a painful breakup that happened four months ago. While noticing and trying to befriend the different feelings and thoughts that have been unfolding on a daily basis (rage, guilt, shame, despair), I have made it my business to be open, breathe and fill the racks and bruises of my ego with love, and permeate them with spaciousness, which have turned this process into an empowering and graceful cultivation of presence. Oddly, while feeling residual waves of grief and pain, I feel happier with myself.

Presence is spiritual intelligence, the intelligence of life. It is the wisdom of Being,
which can be accessed only in the present moment. To access spiritual intelligence you have to be out of the ego. Away from the story, explanation and thinking the mind makes up about why things happen. Rather, you are in the question: “What is life teaching me here?” “What can I learn from this?” “How can I open to love now?” Surrender the question to the breath and let it go. Then, when the time is right – and when you least expect it – you receive an answer you can’t even fathom now.

So, how can you deal with the anxiety of the unexpected and the pain of the unknown? You could take a conscious breath, notice your reaction, accept it and let it go – making love real. You can take care of yourself rather than attach to the helpless victim position and get depressed. You can let life happen through you rather than to you. You can become a HUman BrEathINg and transform your challenging experience into presence, spaciousness and love. But in order to that, you have to become skillful at noticing your stress, fear and hurt, learn to access your breath and ground it at your core, accept your anxious thoughts and feelings and let them go. These are some of the most powerful skills you can learn, and that you can utilize under any circumstances and conditions. You learn to calm your world and source your life from its presence. When you become a human breathing rather than a human thinking, you lighten up, you become clearer, you have more fun, more creativity and more vitality.

You can also reverse the aging process. Not that your body doesn't age, but your spirit becomes stronger and more resilient because you carry less weight, less baggage. You become who you have always wanted to be in the future – now.

Can you imagine being comfortable in your skin, accepting and loving who you are and becoming responsible to your life regardless of your circumstances or conditions? Can you imagine that you are an integral part of a universal intelligence that lives and manifests itself through you, and that you have the spiritual intelligence to manifest your needs and become in tune with the rhythm of this intelligence – simply by accepting your Being and letting go of your ego’s inner resistance?

When I watch a program on the suffering in Darfour, or when I am around a person who is going through a great deal of challenges in their lives, or when I see something that is disturbing and that in the past I wanted to run away from so that I wouldn't have to 'go there' or have guilt about, I breathe and connect my breath to the situation, to the people and to their suffering. I do the same thing when I want to partake in someone’s joy or success. It beats envy, pity and competitiveness. I feel that through the breath I connect to the oneness of life of which we are all a part. The breath is not a solution – it is a way. A way to connect to source, create happiness and make love real, regardless of circumstances or conditions.