on the exhale
For weeks, I have been holding my breath, waiting for this school year to close. Summer’s welcome reprieve is especially sweet this year. It has been an emotional ride and as I look around and see all of us still standing, I am grateful. I think I might be able to breathe.
As I waited for the 8th Grade Graduation to start last night, I was reading an article by David Servan Schreiber on handling stress. The timing was perfect. Except that the message was tough. Schreiber is a French psychiatrist and a regular contribute to Ode, the magazine that I was reading. The title of his book, “Healing without Freud or Prozac” gives a hint about his biases and the articles I have read by Schreiber have been profound in their simplicity. If only simplicity were easy.
Schreiber challenges our vacation-focused culture as being a bulimic approach to stress management. We learn to expand our psychic stomachs to hold inordinate amounts of stress, holding our breath until the next vacation when we can release. Binge and purge. The problem, of course, is that a lifetime of stress with a couple escape valves leads to any number of health concerns. In other words, it doesn’t work.
Freud and Prozac have a place in helping us to manage the expanded psyche between purges, but Schreiber suggests something more basic and accessible. Breathing. Listening to our body as it begins to tense, to listen to our breathing, and choose a happy memory to place in our mind. This wisdom, of course, is what our parish nurse, Lisa, has been working with as she publishes weekly “relaxation techniques”. I read them, I use them, and I find myself looking for that piece in the bulletin each week. Breathe in, breathe out.
As I sit in the auditorium awash with feelings, I wonder not at the truth of Schreiber’s words but of the possibility. In a world where storms topple school buildings filled with children, where widowed mothers struggle with cancer, where children face nightmares that don’t stay in their closets… in this world I am sometimes afraid to breathe.
When hurts swells in my chest, my diaphragm has little room to expand. How do I disentangle the fingers of anxiety that clutch at my throat? Where do store the potted plant of my own self-loathing?
Prozac and Freud are both looking pretty good in light of chronic sadness and major anxiety. Both have a place on the shelves of healing tools. But after months of holding my breath, the oxygen coming into my lungs is intoxicating. The bulimic pattern of our stress management routines is overrated. The beauty of breath far surpasses the strength of character demonstrated while withholding it.
Of course, on this first day of summer vacation, I am undoubtedly reveling in the purge. The real challenge, of course, comes at the end of August. But for today, I am grateful for breath.