I have been asthmatic all my life. When I was a kid, my parents gave me this awful raspberry flavoured medicine for bronchitis - a liquid ventolin that used to make me go crazy. Think a two year old with raspberry cordial. I'm sure it's the beginning of my love affair with anxiety - those highs are pretty high. Try not breathing and then suddenly breathing and being a hundred miles an hour. It's the first high I ever had, the start of many. Thing is, it's super hard to come down. Your heart is racing, and your skin is crawling. As a teenager, my mates used to steal my inhaler in science class and take a whole heap of puffs for the buzz. It took me years to be conscious of a ventolin high. It makes my hands shake and my muscles ache. It's a shitty drug to rely on to live. But, you know, lungs.
Well, won't you lend your lungs to me?
Mine are collapsing
Plant my feet and bitterly breathe
Up the time that's passing.
Breath I'll take and breath I'll give
Pray the day ain't poison
Townes Van Zandt
The only thing you can do with all that air sometimes is to get rid of it. It makes you more anxious. Breathing deep made me feel too full. Of what, I wasn't sure, and wasn't equipped to handle. The absence of breath, in becoming absent, makes you want to scream sometimes. What does one do with the bottom half of one's lungs?
The first time I smoked a
blunt
fag
durrie
dart
I was 14 years old, crouched down in the toilets of my high school on high watch for teachers shoes so that we could piff it like a missle into pissy water, hissing in the bowl before the desperate flush. There's something about girl's lips wrapped around a cigarrette that charm me still. Mix hormones with oral pleasures and it's bound to influence your desire. Once, a girl held a cigarette in the same hand that stroked my lips and told me how perfectly they were shaped. I quivered. Quietly. Even now, I am only recognising how much my sexual desire was bound up with the poison weed.
Tobacco gave me something to do with my hands and mouth when I was self concious and too nervous to speak. I loved the ritual of rolling a fag - no tailor made for me, not after the first few years. Roll ups were far cooler, and cheaper too. They belonged to the grunge era - doc marten boots and little black dresses and watching the Hard Ons and Henry Rollins at the Barwon Club. I always came home with more lighters than I arrived with, coloured plastic and five dollar bills falling out of my beer soaked bra. Little bits of tobacco burning my lips. Ashtray kisses in the morning. Lighting one off the other, I had something to do with all that nervous energy.
Well when I'm smoking
Put my worries on a shelf
Don't think about nothin'
Try not to see myself.
Nick Drake
Me, fag in hand, early '90's
To sit with my own breathe and inhale meant I had to sit with all the things that were bothering me about myself in the world. Fill me with anything - smoke, sex, drugs, food - and I felt a little more settled. Without it I felt as if I was spinning and spiralling into a realm I didn't feel comfortable with. It would take me years to come to terms with my relationship with my breath. Years. One needs to be taught to breath.
But no one teaches you to breath. No one teaches you how important it is. It's taken for granted. And so I did not understand the relationship between my anxiety and my breath, and how smoking was just damping that fire that could not ever be put out, because it's your life force, prana, chi - it's meant to feel big, and eternal, and full of potential.
Eventually, I got very, very ill. Having only been with Jamie for a few months, I was struggling to explain to him how I couldn't breathe, until I couldn't make it the two metres to the bathroom. He called me an ambulance. I ended up in Bath hospital respiratory ward for a week. Pneumonia will make you realise how fucking lovely breathing is. There was going to be no more lighting one durry off another for me. It took a while, of course. We eventually gave up on a long journey to Australia through Asia. Broke all the habits that had been binding me for so long. I was pissed off I'd let something control me, and had begin to realise the hold my mind had over me. The more you become conscious, the more you refuse the habits that are thought - less. I became aware that my lungs were absolutely linked to every emotion I'd ever had. In fact, I fell in love with breathing so much that I have written about it many, many times on the Hive blockchain:
How vulnerable my lungs are - to smoke, to diet, to chemcials and pollutants. How receptive they are to my environment, filtering and absorbing oxygen from the air. They're impressionable, pliable, delicate - they are the point of contact with the world at large.
But it's not just that that sinks onto lung tissue - it's emotions too, complex feelings. Our lungs are tender in more than one way. We tend to think of our heart space as the arena for emotions, but as I said above, the fact they are so interwined suggest they too are a heart of sorts. In Chinese Medicine they are the seat of grief, and when it stagnates and pools there, melancholy and sadness take root. Thus, depression too is lung related. I think of long sighs in the body's attempt to activate prana flow, the shroud covering the lungs preventing the tissues opening. I think of my years of chainsmoking roll-ups, not knowing why, but trying to either force the emotion down and cover it with smoke or force the lung tissues open to release my angst. How regrettable that is - it would have been wiser of me to turn to yoga.
The pericardium is a cocoon, and secures the heart to the diagphram, and with each breath we take, the heart lifts up, floats down, lifts up, floats down. It shelters the heart, safeguards it, forms a sheath over its sensitivity and emotiveness. It's a buffer for the heart - not just physically, but psychologically, spiritually. How terrible can the effect of suffering be on this subtle sheath! Think the sudden intake of breath in fright, the hyperventilation of panic, the sudden heart pains in anxiety. No wonder the breath is so important.
Lungs are trees and trees are lungs. As trees photosynthesis, so too do lungs, of a fashion, a gas exchange via capillary action as oxygen rich prana flows into the blood river and carbon di-oxide draws out. Like trees whose leaves do not bud in the Spring, there are so many restrictions to my breathing that prevent the flow of air - asthma is debilitating in this way, but emphasis on my expanding the rib cage and the muscles there help decorate my the lung tree with fully flushed leaves. Backbends helps exercise the lung tissue, inversions benefit the lower lobes. There is little wonder that a bridge to shoulderstand to fish is one of my favourite sequences. All helps with the pranyama, the roots of the lungs receiving oxygen rather than water, but still, the analogy is clear - the tree blossoms. Without this breath into my deep lung tissue I'm light, airy, ungrounded - the lower lung are earth, where I recieve energy and calm.
Now, it's yoga that opens me up, both psychologically and physically. The awareness of, and workings of, my subtle body help me know what to do. I'm aware, for example, that backbends are energising and prescribed as yogic treatment for depression - the lung tissue opens, the prana flows, the yogic tree is fed. Camel pose, a deep backbend, is a moment of intense fear that releases into relief and joy - a camelgasm, I've heard it called. Equal ratio breath helps to even our breathing, our hormones, and our brain patterns. Yoga is what keeps me from depressions door - constant reminders that I can make changes to my subtle body to regulate my emotions. Four seconds in, four seconds out - breath in, breath out, tide in, tide out, the kite sternum sailing in an even and steady breeze.
Me, breathing in a field, yesterday
Breathe, breathe in the air
Don't be afraid to care
Leave but don't leave me
Look around, choose your own ground
For long you live and high you fly
And smiles you'll give and tears you'll cry
And all your touch and all you see
Is all your life will ever be
Pink Floyd
It's better than smoking, this breathing addiction.
Tobacco was my crutch and my identity. It was like another limb, a lover, a friend. It was the vice that was going to kill me and it was the beast that soothed me. I still find myself reaching for a pouch of tobacco, sometimes, or one of those lighters in my pocket.
And then I remember, all I need to do is take a deep, slow breath, and exhale.
Do you have a tobacco story? Natural Medicine is hosting a challenge here - check it out! You can win some HIVE, and we'd love to hear from you!
With Love,
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