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RE: A Friend is Upset - Day 87 - Daily Haiku
Stop Fighting - that should be my new mantra!
Love this haiku - and love your good timing! A friend is in panic mode now, and my sister (yes, she of hospital-on-Easter fame) said, "Well, it's her mess, not yours, so you don't have to fret about it." After two ER visits in one month, I guess Lori has learned "Don't sweat the small stuff," and more to the point, "Pretty much all of it is small stuff" (quote from a Titanic survivor).
Agreed, and pretty much what I've learned as well from a lifetime of meditating.
I remember talking to my sister once, when I was really stressed, and she said something to the effect that if I didn't want to be stressed, I was the one who took Silva and had been meditating for years, so clearly I was choosing to be stressed.
Ouch. And duh. Yes. Precisely.
My own metaphor is pushing a boulder uphill, which I did for decades in business, and in my previous marriage. And, ultimately, when I chose to stop fighting what was, and to simply let it be, yeah, that boulder came crashing down, destroying everything in its wake. And it was one of the best things that ever happened to me.
As a lifelong shallow breather, due to childhood bronchial asthma, I started consciously breathing really slowly and deeply, as a way of counteracting that dynamic. Typical slow breathing is four to eight counts in and out; I typically do more like twenty to thirty counts in, then out. REALLY slow.
And a few really cool things happened. One was that, when I SCUBA dive, my air lasts longer than nearly everyone, because I've developed really good breath control.
Another is that, last year when I had my lung function tested, I have the lung function of a much younger woman, because even when I'm not exercising as I should, I am still doing my deep breathing, and exercising my lungs to their full capacity.
Everything for a reason. ;-)
And, of course, everything you fight against you give your energy to, helping it to grow stronger, which has been one of my hardest lessons in life.
Still learning and relearning that one.
Thank you for yet another keeper of a reply!
I need to internalize this: "everything you fight against you give your energy to, helping it to grow stronger, which has been one of my hardest lessons in life" - I've backed down a lot, but I still do too much of the fighting.
Deep breathing! You remind me of something I learned quite recently: on the exhale, most of us never really fully exhale. We can push, and push again, and get out still more air. And this matters, because... well, I forget. Yoga breathing, and all that. Calming breaths, Cleansing breaths.
Scuba! My sinuses hated it - but snorkeling, I can manage. Love the water, live thousands of miles from the shore. Someday...
LOL - my diving experience is the opposite! I started out diving in the rarely-pacific Pacific Ocean, and snorkeling is too damned much work, not to mention that I got tired of inhaling half the water I was swimming through.
With SCUBA, I could dive beneath the waves, escaping the turbulence, and I found it very freeing not to have to surface every couple of minutes. Snorkeling in that environment is far more tiring to me.
I also found that, as soon as I was underwater and breathing, I was immediately "at level," in a meditative state, and the water surrounding me felt as though I was being embraced by the Earth herself; which of course I was. I know people who find SCUBA too confining, and feel claustrophobic when they dive with gear, but I am the opposite, and have always felt it to be very freeing.
I found it much easier to approach fish and marine animals while SCUBA diving, because I had the time to approach cautiously and slowly, so as not to scare them away. Yes, some animals are afraid of the bubbles, which makes slow steady breathing a real asset. And yes, holding your breath helps as well, as long as you take care to only do so when stationary, and never to do so while ascending to the surface.
I've been really missing the ocean of late, being landlocked as well, especially since I spent nearly my whole life within half an hour or less from the beach. I'm about a ten hour drive from my old home, in Largo, Florida, though our closest beach is probably Savannah, Georgia, which is about six and a half hours to our southeast.
But the last beach I actually visited was thousands of miles away, when I visited Monterey Bay last April, which is among my top favorite places on the California coast. The last time I dived there I was a teenager, but what I really want to do is sail there again - there simply isn't a better place to sail than California, because you always have wind. Absolutely glorious.
As for deep breathing, and exhaling to the maximum, that is one of the primary ways for the body to get rid of any toxins that accumulate is a gaseous form, such as excess carbon dioxide or nitrogen. If we don't exhale thoroughly, they (and other toxins) accumulate in our tissues and elsewhere.
For carbon dioxide specifically, it tends to accumulate around our joints, hence the popping sound when we get a chiropractic adjustment; that is the sudden release of carbon dioxide that has been trapped. This is one of the greatest benefits of aerobic exercise, because it causes us to breathe more deeply, hence the term "aerobic," thus helping us to detoxify our bodies.
And yeah. Yoga breathing. Amazing for our health in so many ways.
The water's embrace - I totally get it! For me, with chronic sinus headaches, the changing pressure was unbearable. The wet suit felt claustrophobic. Skin diving (snorkeling) felt so liberating. No tanks, no pressure gages to watch, no fear of breaking a hose or running out of oxygen. And the popping of joints - oh my! - could it be my osteoarthritis and popping knees/neck vertebra just need me to exhale better? Crazy. Thanks again Cori for another fantastic full-length reply, worthy of a chapter in Crescendo of Peace!
I can totally relate. I don't usually get sinus headaches, but I've had hayfever since I was a kid, and the few times I was dim enough to dive with bad allergies, trying to equalize the pressure in my ears took most of my time, and wasn't all that successful. Not a fun outing.
I mostly dove in just a bathing suit, even in California, and my total dives in a full wetsuit are few and far between. Even though the water was cold, I usually opted out of the wetsuit, mostly because I never found one that fit me well; and because I'm short, and they were almost always way too long, they cut off my circulation in my legs. Not the optimum way to dive.
Though when I dove a wreck in Barbados, I would have given anything for a wetsuit, as that is the one and only time I ran into sea lice, which are larval jellyfish, complete with full-sized stings! Ouch!
Then again, once I finally found a shorty wetsuit I liked, I wound up wearing it during most of our sailboat races, because I could get completely drenched and still not freeze. I had all my foul weather gear, but that was much more unwieldy, and as most of my racing was in the Tampa Bay area, it was just way too hot most of the time.
The shorty wetsuit was FAR more comfortable, in a wider range of temperatures and situations, and if I did fall overboard, which thankfully never happened, it wouldn't fill with water and weigh me down in the water. Much safer overall.
I'd gladly you give my wetsuit, custom-ordered when I was 125 pounds and 5-foot-4, but it's 30 years old and possibly disintegrated in the closet for lack of use. Our daughters would fit into it but show no interest in diving. If our son the bassist ever moves to Brazil like he wants, he might find a gal who'd wear it. My deep diving days are over. Unless the chronic sinusitis ever goes away. Stick to a Paleo or Autoimmune diet, I might even get back down to 125 pounds.... ha....
Sea lice!! A friend of mine ran into those during a vacation to Turks and Cacos. Yikes!!!
Yeah, they're nasty little bastards. Thankfully I never ran into them in all my diving in Florida or I'd have had a much shorter diving career.
I thought about going the custom wetsuit route, and nearly ordered one a couple of times. But in the end I decided that they're like hats. I basically dislike wearing them, so why spend the money on something bound to spend its life in my closet?