Breath is life.
I’ve been doing yoga on and off forever. My mom taught yoga in a community center when I was six. This was the 1970s, back when yoga was just starting to land in North America because the Beatles got curious and George Harrison went to India in 1966. By the time I was a kid, every hippie I knew was doing yoga. Our house was full of draft dodgers hiding from the Vietnam war and half of them were stretching on the living room floor. Thank you George Harrison. You brought a gift into my world before I even knew what it was.
I’m not saying nobody in North America knew yoga before the Beatles. I’m saying the Beatles made it mainstream. They gave us more than music. They gave us a way to be.
I loved yoga from the start. It grounded me, made me laugh, relaxed me. At six, of course I didn’t know the science behind this 4,500 year practice. Western scientists are only now trying to figure out what India understood a long time ago.
Fast forward. I started university in 2011, at age 46. Terrified every day. I had sold everything I owned to sit in that classroom. I didn’t know what to do with a semicolon. I came from the business world, where I survived by working 80 hours a week just to keep up with people working 60.
To get through school, I crawled back to yoga and nature walks. Two things I grew up with but had dropped along the way. It is hard to find your mat or your trees when you live inside boardrooms, spreadsheets and program manuals. At least it was for me.
But once I came back, I flourished. My nervous system finally exhaled after 40 years of holding its breath.
Yoga is life. Yoga is breath. The poses matter, but even without them, breathing alone can change you. My Kundalini yoga teacher once told me about a client who only did breathwork for two solid years. She started out depressed and in chronic pain. Her illness was slow and cruel. She had been on antidepressants for years. She quit them. She kept breathing. Today she is pain free. She is still alive. Still moving. Breath changed her life.
Breath changed mine too.
In April 2024 I had surgery to amputate a couple of toes. The surgery was clean. The meds were not. Canada got rid of lead pharmaceutical oversight, so a database played doctor and crashed my medications together. Cymbalta, which I had only been on for 6-weeks, and hydromorphone. The mix poisoned my brain. I am lucky I lived.
Because of the brain confusion, all I could do was breathwork. I had to crawl to the bathroom because I kept face planting. One time, I got stuck on a busy street in downtown Toronto and had to do a few minutes of breathwork before I could stand up again. Boy, did I look silly. But I knew what to do, and it worked.
As the fog lifted a couple months later, I got back on my mat. I kept falling. Tremors ran up my face and into my right eye, still coming sometimes but not nearly as bad. I cried through every pose, scared I was broken forever.
As a contract employee with no benefits and soon to turn 60, it felt like a death sentence. Every day I made a deal with myself to just breathe. And it worked. I want to live now, but I sure didn’t back then. I hated what my life had become. I hated who I was. I hated everything about everything. I was full of hate and breath.
Then came the not so wise decision. Even my teacher told me to wait. But I couldn’t work and I had no money except what was sitting on my credit cards. So I went all in. Something told me to trust the yoga. I can’t explain it. Maybe it was the brain damage. Maybe it was my body telling me to get to that mat and stay there until I came up different. I flew to Rishikesh, India the same place George Harrison went. The yoga capital of the world.
I signed up for a 200-hour yoga teacher training at Maharishi Yoga Peeth. I decided to start with foundational yoga, the Hatha yoga from which all other styles stem. Twelve-hour days for 30 days. I struggled. I fell over. I never could learn the beautiful Sanskrit words for the poses. Luckily, most students were Western, so English worked. I sobbed. I soaked my mat with sweat, tears, and snot. I caught dengue fever. I kept going. It was the best thing I ever did for myself.
Maybe I could’ve healed sitting in my apartment in Toronto, but I flourished just witnessing how loving everyone was. No judgment. No well-meaning friends constantly correcting me when I got my words wrong or teasing me that I didn’t need my full brain anyway. The teachers and fellow students just accepted me as I showed up. After all, they had no reference for the person I used to be just months before. Everyone was so caring. They only hoped I would show up. I never missed a class. Determination is something I can do. Even if I face planted, and I did, I showed up. Instead of standing tree, I did falling tree poses.
Sometimes, fellow students would stop their own pose and hold me up so I could at least feel what my body was moving towards. Isn’t that love? I am so proud of my falling tree poses now. I do yoga my way. People with no feet can do yoga. I can certainly do it with a few less toes and the odd seizure. Health Canada won’t call them seizures, but when a tremor starts in your neck and works its way up your face before it settles behind your eye, it feels like a seizure to me. It feels like a fucking earthquake. Call it what you want. I’ll describe it how it feels.
Today, when I’m up all night from nightmares or body memories from the childhood sexual violence I carry at a cellular level, when the brain injury rattles old trauma loose, all I can do is breathe. So I breathe. This is the root cause of my pain body. Those toes. That dangerous cocktail of drugs. They were just the tip of the iceberg. My story is not a sinking ship. I am learning to breathe my way to a new me. A stronger me. I am embracing the brain challenges and remembering how courageous and determined I am to live my life to its fullest. I am clawing my way back to health one breath at a time.
Yoga, nature walks and writing to you are how I heal.
I’ll write about Polyvagal Theory next. The world of yoga is vast and healing. In the meantime, just breathe.
Below are some clips to explore. Try one. Try them all. The whole point is to trust yourself. Listen to your body. And breathe.
You’re looking at five very proud, newly graduated yoga teachers, trained by Master Kishan at Maharishi Yoga Peeth, one of the top yoga schools in Rishikesh, India.
Kundalini Yoga. Alternate Nostril Breathing
https://youtu.be/FgET8CVU9Go?si=9yquzw8eo1iAOxCc
How Should We Breathe During Kundalini Yoga
https://youtu.be/SrKEtkTJs40?si=_rc5nBzOlE9jn5ev
Deepak Chopra on breathwork and deep sleep
https://youtube.com/shorts/gw7Qhl-V1b0?si=LqoF_2G78pijWdgC
Breath of Ten with Jana
https://youtu.be/VLyndPBLkKE?si=vUgQdgSLV57u5v6Z
