How I breathed for 21 days and turned into a human

When we signed up to breathe for 21 days, I don't think any of us knew what they were getting into.

Especially by the way our teacher had talked it up, telling us about the way some people had dug up some pretty intense emotional stuff, how it had brought about important changes, and all that. It never ceases to impress me, the hunger we humans have for changing. We keep expecting there's the great big figured-out exit, just around the next corner, don't we? To be honest, I think that was mostly why we got into it.

So we all in class agreed to practice nadi shodhana (alternate nostril breathing) for 21 days, 20 minutes each day. Now, it doesn't sound like a lot, does it? It seemed like nothing at all when we agreed to do it, after which our teacher had us practice it in class together. It seemed endless. Damn uncomfortable, too. Hard on the knees and the soul. At the end of which, our teacher very seriously informed us - that was 15 minutes. Good luck.

But, erm, we did it. And it wasn't easy. Some days, it seemed impossible right up to the point of possibility. Where am I going to find 20 minutes? When we started, I worried I'd quit. See, I don't like rules. Impositions. Feeling like I have to. But there was also this sense that it was larger than me, that we were doing this together. That I'd set out to try.

And somehow, I kept finding those 20 minutes. A couple of times, I tried doing them during PA classes, but that doesn't really work. You can't focus and not focus at the same time, so instead, I found they were easiest to do sitting on the ground, preferably in the dark, listening to music.

The first week, I was just dying for the time to pass. I had a hard time sitting still. Fidgeting. Moving about the room to pick up a sock or put the coffee on. My knees aching, my calves going numb on me, my arm getting tired.

I won't say the second week was any better, because I don't think it was. In fact, I can't remember, looking back, a precise point where it felt easier. Better. But somewhere along the way, it stopped feeling like a "must". I even started closing my eyes and observing my thoughts. Who would've thought, right?

I cried a lot, though I really didn't believe it would "bring up" anything. Not things I was unaware of. Just, I guess when you buzz about, it's easier to live with some things. Sitting still for 20 minutes, lost in music I really like gave me a chance to really sit with some things. And there was this wonderful, painful sense of

This is just how it is.

And it's unbearably weird to decompress that, especially if you're a doer and used to changing things, getting things to be better, to perhaps go your way. This is just a bad thing and it hurts terribly and there's nothing I can do about it. It will not change when I finish this exercise. And that's that.

It's an astoundingly difficult thing to acknowledge and sit with. It makes one uncomfortable. You keep thinking "but couldn't I...", "but what if I...", and while it's good to be pro-active, it doesn't always work. Some things just are. And when that happens, when things just are, there's this powerful temptation, I've found, to repress them. To say "well I didn't want it to be otherwise anyway".

Except that's lying. Makes you live inside an untruth. Not entirely healthy, either. In my breathing exercise, I found a place where I could express to the void how much I wished it had been otherwise, how much some things hurt still. And to hear reflected back at me,

I know.

I also found, perhaps related to this practice, perhaps not, greater patience, more openness. It became a little easier over time to side-step my initial responses to certain people and situations. I found somehow an improved ability to observe that this is a person trying to speak their truth to me in the way they think best. That they weren't trying to step on me or mock me or hurt me or...or.

To accept that this is how it's all going down, I suppose. And you can set yourself against it 'cause it's not going your way, but that's not gonna make it much easier.

We talked through it. I found myself confronted with people with realities vastly different from my own, and somehow found the space not to dismiss them out of hand, not to diminish in my mind the struggles they were expressing.

It's all just a constant uphill for the rare moments when someone hears you say "Here, this is my reality".
To my great surprise, I found I didn't want the damn thing to end.

It's called tapas. It's basically self-discipline. Saying here, I'll do this, even though maybe it's not always easy, even if there seems to be no room to do it in the day. Even if something annoys me. Even if I'm sitting here under an onslaught of emotion and there's still 6 fucking minutes on the clock to go.

And after three weeks, I got it. Because as I say, I'm not someone who does well under "you must". If you look, you mostly don't really gotta. And yet I realized this funny thing, that pushing myself in this isolated practice also translated into the rest of my life - sure, you don't actually gotta keep sitting here, but what happens if you do?

I went through some situations like a duck through water where before I would've gotten outraged, offended. Said fuck you, maybe. Which isn't to say fuck you is now out of the vocabulary, far from it, it just gave me a better understanding of the difference between bad situations where fuck you is perfectly appropriate and called for, and just odd and uncomfortable situations where it might do me well to stay, even if it doesn't come natural.

It's a fucking frightening thing. Realizing that everyone you so readily dismiss and write off as extremist, foolish, naive, narcissistic or plain not worth your while might actually have a moral compass, worthwhile things to say and is genuinely trying to go through life and through this interaction with you the best way they know how. It's much, much easier to say "oh, you didn't do things as I might've. That allows me to dismiss you."

I liked it.

I tried to pepper through this my three songs for the week. I find this version of Money Changes Everything superbly encapsulates the bittersweet feeling, the inability to change anything, the rage, but also the energy, the force that is your life happening. So that's my #threetunetuesday, too. Hi, @ablaze.