Page 43 - Taming Your Gremlin A Surprisingly Simple Method for Getting Out of Your Own Way (Rick Carson)_Neat

Eventually you will stop breathing and your body will rot. Until then,
gently, without hyperventilating, simply make certain to take in all of the
fresh air your body needs and desires, and to exhale fully. How and what

you breathe affects your health and your disposition. Proper breathing for
healthy people under healthful circumstances comes easily. Millions of
happy infants and soundly-sleeping grown-ups do it constantly without
effort. As for you, if you take into your lungs too little good, clear oxygen,
you are sure to get tense, blue, and probably ill. If you take in too much
without exhaling it completely, you will get woozy and act strange.

My first draft of this chapter contained an elaborate description of what
happens in your body when you breathe, as well as a specific breathing

activity I use with my clients and students. I chucked them both. The
explanation took too many words, and breathing is such a fundamental (and
important) experience that writing about it felt contrived. Here’s what I’d
like you to know:

Full, clear breathing is important. It entails liberal and lively movement
of your abdomen outward as you inhale and inwardly as you exhale. This

sounds backward to some people, and it might to you. Your tendency may
be to pull your abdomen in when you inhale and force it out when you
exhale. This stomach in/chest out style of inhalation allows you to fill only
the upper portion of your lungs. It’s the way you breathe when you’re
having a gremlin attack. It is a breathing style that is common to all of us
when we feel threatened or anxious, but folks who breathe this way
habitually are often people who are perpetually fearful and suspicious,
usually because of hurtful past experiences. They tend to distrust

themselves and others. This type of breathing and the bodily tension that
accompanies it are an attempt to brace against life rather than to live in it.

When you cramp your breathing, you block emotions and limit your
ability to sense and fully experience the world around you. Your awareness
becomes concentrated in your intellect to the exclusion of your body and
sensory receptors. We all do this to some extent at times, such as when we

are grappling with some unresolved issue from our past, analyzing a
dilemma, or trying too hard to predict or mentally prepare for the future.