IT'S SAFE TO SOFTEN

Notes from a Breath Workshop

Some DIY Wind Chimes! by Crafts by Courtney

A woman with turquoise velvet pants met me at the door of the yoga studio and opened the gate. 

“We waited for you,” she said, and led me inside. 

“You’ve been here before?” she asked. I had.

It’s a yoga place with a simple practice room on the ground floor with a neutral colored thin carpet and so the space is a little softer than most. There’s a gong that sits in the corner and on the ledge at the side of the room there are a few chimes and dare I say crystals. Generally speaking the classes are intimate and well taught and despite my criticism of any studio I’ve been to since Ashtanga Yoga Nilayam closed its doors during the pandemic, I liked the place.

In the main yoga room a handful of people sat in a wide circle with a bolster and a blanket and the leader who had let me in, a woman experienced in both breath work and trauma, took her spot at 12:00. I sat down in the open space at 6:00 and listened as she described her own history with the work. I barely noticed that her left foot was wooden. She referred to it often throughout her introduction, referencing the amputation, the motorcycle accident, and the way her breath had kept her alive while she waited for medical help on the side of a dusty road.

Our first instruction was to introduce ourselves and say why we had decided to attend. I’ve been doing workshops like these here or there over the past year and the real reason, besides generally loving the body and everything that goes with it, is just to stay off my phone for three hours straight. And this workshop went from 1pm-4pm on a Saturday. Instead when I introduced myself I said something else that was also true: I had chronic pain in my lower back on the right side and I was wondering if breath work might help to resolve it. Other people had other reasons—difficulty with raising children, confronting new chapters of life, questioning lifelong patterns of self doubt or self criticism, and a willingness to go deeper into self discovery than yoga teacher training were among them.

After the circle finished our introductions, we went on to do partner work, which is always a little intimidating and exciting for me. I’ve always had a secret wish to be a massage therapist (or not so secret depending on who in my life you might ask!) and I think my hope is that any partner work will affirm my interest in having a healing touch.

This particular exercise was very simple: a three step practice beginning with setting our hands on our partner’s backs as they lay on their stomach and breathed. It got a little more challenging as our partners turned around and we were supposed to put our hands on their chests and diaphragms. My partner seemed less receptive as she laid face up than she did when she laid face down. Then our partner’s sat up and we put our hands on their head and then also grounded them with a hand on their lower spine, tugging down slightly. They were meant to breathe into our hands at each step trying to expand their stomachs. Once that was done we switched and I breathed as she held and noticed. After each turn we took a moment to say what we felt.

I said only that I wasn’t surprised that she had two kids because as she breathed into my hand and I held her stomach I felt that she had a lot of power there. It sounds a little bit crazy to say it but it was actually true! Her breath had surprised me–how expansive it was and almost other dimensionally wise. She accepted my thoughts and shared her own with me: how she hadn’t felt a strong relationship between my in breath and my out breath until, all at once, they seemed to connect, and she felt it was as if water in a pan was moving back and forth from one side to the other. It may sound crazy to say it but I knew what she meant. I had noticed that breath was different from the others too.

Back in the circle I noticed that my out breath was different in its connection to the next breath I felt a kind of self generated pleasure. 

Everyone seemed to have questions. As each person asked theirs, the leader invited them to lay down in the center of the circle so she could observe their breathing and say what she saw. First without touching us at all she just watched us intently before calling out with glee some deep emotional character attribute she found associated with the way our breath moved. There were unsurprisingly a few control freaks in the group, people whose chest remained locked even as their breath expanded their diaphragm with relative ease. 

Then there were people who felt that they had too heavy or long of an out breath when in fact they were forcing their breath to move out of their bodies, rather than softening when they exhaled. These people also experienced some level of lack of safety, and were sent back to the circle with a reminder that “it is safe to breathe.” I watched with a lot of enjoyment that I didn’t understand. Did I think the breath could be read? I certainly have spent as much time if not more on the markings of my palm. Plus the leader really did change the breath in the person’s body just by making her remarks and placing her hands, much like we did but more expertly, on the diaphragm and the chest. One woman, unsurprisingly broke out in tears after she felt her breath move differently than she was accustomed to, which our leader genuinely navigated—holding her head gently and acknowledging the emotion but also somehow helping the person maintain some sense of dignity as she, well, breathed through the grief and got to the other side. 

When I heard my name, I scampered to the center and laid down. 

“Now,” she said, “just don’t alter your breath in any way.”

“Oh, I’m definitely going to,” knowing that I cared too much about looking like I was a good breather to resort to my everyday shallow anxious breath. 

But I didn’t try too hard, and when she bent over me she began to feel under my right ribcage with her fingers.

“You’re a doer,” she said. 

“Uh huh,” I agreed.

“You have a lot of lists?” She said this as both a statement and a question that ended with a pause. 

I think I just raised my eyebrows as confirmation, but she asked for it to be said aloud. 

“Am I right?” she asked. I said that she was.

I looked up at her face and noticed she had more wrinkles up close than could be noticed from across the circle, where she had seemed to defy a lot of the operational laws of aging. 

“I was just like you,” she said, bending down over me and said, in what seemed to be a softer voice, “until I blew my foot off.”

Then she sat up briskly and touched my chest. 

“She’s pretty open,” she said to the group, which I do think is true. But so did the person whose chest moved not at all when he breathed, even after he had seen other’s have the same paralysis of motion.

“It’s chaotic,” he commented, of his own breath, and our leader seemed to cheer him on. 

“Yes! It’s chaotic! That’s what we want!”

I had felt what he had felt, when I had been laying down on the floor, my body flat on the familiarly patterned yoga blanket with its white woolen fridge. 

“It’s not Ujjayi breathing," she had said to someone else while we practiced, and I wondered what I had been doing all these years, controlling the breath so intentionally. It was as if yoga was the opposite of what I had been practicing, even under careful instruction. As if I had missed the point entirely.

Then she suggested that I might have a troubling feeling deserving of all the abundance that I had before sending me back to the circle with a reminder that it was ok to soften. 

We all took a break. I went out to the yard in the back and chatted with a fellow workshop participant about hummingbirds, the Esalen hot springs, vultures and divorce, all in the course of a few minutes. It did seem suddenly easier to be vulnerable.

The last part of the workshop involved us all breathing quite quickly with our eyes closed while lying down and listening to music meant to take us through some kind of journey of release and connection.

“We’re not hyperventilating,” our leader said, while also setting the pace for a breath which was faster than I am used to. After a series of repetitions of movement and breathing, some accompanied by chimes rung behind us, we stood up in place. She walked around and shook a good smelling plant around our bodies ritualistically.

I am sad to say I did not experience much of anything during the last portion of the workshop but that does not mean I’m not a believer. I was not transformed but I don’t think transformation was part of the promise. Instead I found a capacity to sit with more difficult emotions for longer periods of time which I’ve found critical to writing. There is so much discomfort involved in putting words on the page when you don’t want to. Today was one of those days.