Are You Breathing Right?

by William R.Morrow, D.Min.,LMFT . Email to:wmorrowmft@embarqmail.com

I try hard to follow instructions, so when I went in for a medical check up, I marched through the routine obediently. After a few preliminaries, the doctor donned his stethoscope, and said, “Take a few deep breaths” while he listened to my lungs. I guess I passed that hurdle without any heavy breathing in his face, because then he commanded, “Now, breathe normally!”

Although that bit of instruction seemed simple enough, I was confused, because I know that “normal” isn’t what it used to be.

My confusion was because I know the history of human breathing. It has definitely evolved from the days before anyone was really self-conscious about it. The Primitive Human Breather was basically pretty relaxed about in-and-out, unless, of course, he had to fight or flee. But aside from those stress times on the heart and lungs, our guy knew instinctively just what to do, and how to breathe.

In this modern era, we have to restore the God-given natural inspiration/expiration, and learn how to breathe properly.

What we know as the autonomic nervous system had evolved nicely from reptiles to upright mammals. The more oxygen required for the bigger brains of the human types, meant the more our heart/lung function had to work efficiently 

I recently added a new chapter in my understanding of how we breathe from Dr. Louis Damis, a health psychologist, who helps people with headache pain. He presented his findings at a weekend conference of the Florida Society of Clinical Hypnosis.

According to him, many of the pain problems of the upper body are a result of improper breathing. The upper body is connected to the brain by the vagal nerve system. And poor breathing is systemically connected to poor heart function. This can add up to trouble, especially for people who have been subject to excessive stress.

But fortunately Clinical Hypnosis, as a health profession, is geared to restoring healthy breathing through teaching relaxation. Relaxation is already an essential part of hypnosis, (along with inner focus and suggestion). Pain relief is a result of relaxation.

So, if the goal is to promote relaxed breathing, then we have to learn what that looks and feels like. Here’s the spoiler: in the bluster of 21^st century life, WE DO NOT KNOW HOW TO BREATHE CORRECTLY. What I used to think was normal breathing was actually chest breathing. The greater stress of everyday living has trained us into this maladaptive mode for getting oxygen and staying loose and relaxed.

The human body was not designed for continual chest breathing. In order to deal with pain, and the anxiety often connected with it, we have to train ourselves in STOMACH BREATHING or diaphragmatic breathing.

Stomach breathing is associated with the calming effect of the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS). The PNS is essentially the relaxation response of the general nervous system. Proper breathing actually turns on the PNS. But people have to learn this, I should say RELEARN this, since, way back, we once came by it naturally.

The treatment for many upper body pains is learning and practicing diaphragmatic or stomach breathing, employing the diaphragm muscle and the stomach. Follow this link for step-by-step instructions.

http://tinyurl.com/U-Breathe

You can practice this for use in pain problem situations as well as other anxiety effects on the body. After daily practice sessions, of ten repetitions each of the deep breathing, your ongoing regular breath can eventually become more of a stomach breath.  Who knows, you may evolve into the way we were originally meant to breathe. It is easiest to practice lying down on your back.

“OLD PICTURE COULD BE KEY TO MOTHER’S MISSING YEARS”

A work of fiction, which tells an important truth.

“Who was your mother before she was married?” asked the bureaucratic form I had to fill out. The question threw me.

 To be honest, I didn’t have a mother before she was married and I was born. My life with my mother didn’t begin before she gave birth to me, yet incredibly she had a life of her own all those earlier years. I only know her from our shared life on this planet

It all started from the “baby book”, in which everyone (I’m thinking the whole world!) was amazed at my first  hesitant steps and first words( “bring me a pad and pencil”). It went on, as I now remember, from one glorious/scary phase of my life to another, like the unraveling of a ball of yarn rolling downhill.

But, and here’s the intriguing mostly blank prologue, what was her own life like before I came along? I only get this second hand. And it is doubtful my last remaining older relatives are telling me everything they know.

Left to my own devices, I would create a heroic story to fill in some of the gaps in the family narrative. It would be a piece of historical fiction, part true, part embellished, but satisfying my taste for the dramatic: As we all might think, she was no ordinary mother, and I no ordinary child. Fears and flaws linked up in a loving way.

The grief period following my mother’s death (Dad had died 12 years before) was made mundane by the gruesome task of settling her estate and clearing out her things from the apartment. There were scads of her treasures and trash which had accumulated over the years. knick-knacks of dubious value, books and pictures At first I thought the clothing would be the hardest part to deal with, but when I found the old shoe box in the back of the closet, I was in for a surprise.

There it was, partially hidden behind a box of Christmas ornaments, on one of the dusty shelves next to the ancient movie projector. “Grace Ample’s Shoe Emporium” was the colorful label on the shoe box, but with that dusty rose ribbon tied around it, I just  knew it wouldn’t contain shoes.

When I opened the box, I discovered a few old snapshots, mostly discolored by time, and beginning to fade. Nervously, I lifted the snapshots to the light of the bedroom window. These were pictures of my mother I had never seen before! One old black and white deckle- edged Kodak was obviously a much younger version of my mother dressed in dowdy acrobat’s tights, and standing next to an elephant. On the back it simply said “Mason City, Iowa, July 1920”. The other snapshot of interest was a smiling woman, proudly holding an infant child right up next to her own face. Scrawled familiarly on the back of it was simply, “Our precious gift”.

Although I knew she had had several miscarriages, I didn’t know if the baby in the picture was me or not until I read the entry from the journal page that was lodged underneath the pictures: “Until William was born”, my mother had written, “I could never find myself. I never had the courage to later tell him how I ran away with the circus at 17, looking for something-I- didn’t-know-what. I guess I just made up some things about those ‘missing years’ to protect him from my mixed-up past. It is a wonder that I didn’t get into more trouble before I met his father. He was the stable one and told me we were going to get married and settle down. I just trusted him.

“ When I sustained the pregnancy, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. As a young new mother, my life took on real meaning. I finally understood how God sends us children to enlarge our hearts, because mine was wonderfully swelled with love when he was born. Because of everything that happened later, I was just never good at showing him this love, but it was there all the time, whether he ever felt it or not.”

I framed the elephant picture, and keep it around where I can still see it out of the corner of my eye. 

There are three take-aways from this story: 1. The best mystery stories are about mothers. 2.All writers are egocentric 3. Motherlove is usually underestimated.

“What Makes a Visionary? The Story of a Good Idea.”

Look, and you will see there are a lot of good ideas floating around like effervescing light bulbs in the night sky. Above the heads, especially of creative persons, you might notice a lot of bright ideas. Dreamers and inventors imagine more things in one day than can ever become reality. But a visionary is something quite different. A visionary is someone who can stick with an idea, develop it, and see it blossom in such a way that it makes a difference, and even changes the world. Visionaries see what COULD BE down the road ahead.

The visionary also seems to be someone who is almost burdened with the persistence of the grand idea. At least that is the case with my friend Dr Martin Price, who is the founder of ECHO, the Educational Concerns for Hunger Organization. Martin agreed to talk to me about how he lived several years with the idea of ECHO until it became a reality. I was curious how the creative process works, considering that many ideas never reach solid ground.

Although Martin is a scientist, with a Ph.D. in Biochemistry, his scientific discipline did not have a central role in launching the ECHO organization. As I learned from him, it seemed to be more about his Christian faith, and how that faith played out in inspiration.

As I see it, science, in its pure from, can bring many remarkable innovations to our world. By way of research involving inductive reasoning, the scientific disciplines pursue new truths empirically. New ideas are apprehended or grasped with cognitive rigor, and carefully documented studies. A new truth comes at the end of a long line of reasoning.

But visionaries, I think, do not so much search and ultimately discover a new truth, as they are seized by a truth. They are often ordinary people with an extraordinary calling. The vision of “what could be” is received, as if from somewhere else. In Martin’s case, it was, for him, inspiration from God. He describes his spiritual journey with this developing inspiration as sometimes “tortured”. It was as if it were inscribed on his inner blueprint, whether he desired it or not. Yet he says it would qualify as an inspiration mostly in hindsight.

He came to believe that all of his skills and training should be used to help the poor. On a watershed evening nearly forty years ago, he was taking a walk on the campus of Geneva College when it occurred to him “What are the prayers of a poor farmer living (in another country) with his family in some impoverished situation?” When he imagined what those prayerful needs were, he felt a calling to employ his scientific knowledge to help the desperately poor. It was not a clarion call exactly, because there were doubts along the way, and much to be sorted out for his vocational plans. But one thing that did sustain him was a photo torn from a magazine of a nurse holding a malnourished baby. He kept the photo posted in his office, as a kind of sustaining symbolic image of his ongoing and persistent “vision”.

The vision, as I am calling it, stayed with him. And without clear knowledge of which direction he was to go, he took some risks with his career. Martin says it seemed right to proceed without certainty of where the project was going, “because you can’t see the success at the beginning”. It only gradually became clear to him that he could fill a gap in the technical preparation of agricultural missionaries. The global problem was food scarcity among small farmers in developing countries. The structure of a solution was to provide resources for just these people who needed it the most.

 Instead of supplying food directly to the hungry, trained missionaries, Peace Corps workers, and community development workers could teach the hungry and nutritionally deficient people how to increase food production right where they lived. Along with technical assistance, providing seeds (free) of nutritious plants was the aim. Many of the plants that could help feed a family were discovered in one country, but unknown in another country where the growing conditions were similar. The spirit of experimentation proved to be an essential quality for putting the visionary ideas into practice. This meant that agricultural scientists who wanted to share practical ideas could be brought together with each other and those who, with practical education, would branch out to share their knowledge. And ultimately, a network of farmer to farmer.

As simple as this sounds in the twenty-first century, I see this as part of the historical shift in the concept of global agricultural mission work. The desire of missionaries to spread the Gospel became directly linked to a knowledgeable and practical way to feed the poor and hungry, a Biblical injunction. Within missionary theology, there seems to have been a shift from a focus on the next world to a focus on the quality of life in this world. And it suggests viewing a person’s soul wholistically, rather than as a separate entity apart from the material body.

  ECHO’s education and training program now serves 160, mostly equatorial, countries where food production is challenging for a variety of reasons. Through its four satellite centers around the globe, the work continues to expand.

What makes a visionary would seem to be a combination of good reasoning as well as inspiration. With Martin as an example, it would seem that some sort of open-minded receptivity was required. My theory is that good inspirations come from a common source of constructive Creativity, a kind of Muse. Perhaps it could even be termed, the “mind of God”. Karl Jung calls this the Collective Unconscious. Such things as medical advances, technological advances, and artistic creations, that no one else had thought of before, flow from this realm. If you could imagine that civilization has progressed from the first wheel to space flight, and from tribal cultures to rule of law, then you might also imagine that there are yet more benefits to emerge, through visionaries, to this world we live in.

I asked Martin if he had any new visions for future development. He thought it might be less an impact than ECHO’s global mission, but he would like to do more to introduce newcomers to Florida to a 12-month food gardening season. As a good idea, it could, he suggested, be shared with anyone in the world.   

Wisdom and Your Unfortunate Mortality

I have some good news and some bad news.

 First the bad news: You are getting older. As you celebrate one more birthday, you are bound to notice that time marches on, and ,inflexibly, you continue to march toward old age. I hate to be the bearer of such reality, but it must be pointed out.

But now the good news: You are getting wiser with each passing year. I think it is fortunate and no accident that wisdom seems to accumulate with your lifetime of experience. Wisdom is actually a form of intelligence that you cannot acquire any other way than by living. It enhances your judgment and common sense; just what you need for going down the road on the journey we all are assigned. The longer you live, the wiser you get.

When I reached my seventieth birthday, I made an announcement at my Rotary Club. I said, “ Now that I have reached 70, it is reassuring to know that I am not going to die young.” In other words, I had some consolation, that in achieving my senior years, I would have time to figure out what it means to be old. I reasoned that people who die young might have got caught without a chance to come to terms with mortality.

This is an expanding market, where more and more elderly citizens will have to deal with aging, one way or another. By the year 2020, there will be more people 60 and older than there has ever been on the planet. The population is already top heavy with senior citizens looking for answers about how to live later life to the fullest.

The problem is that there is a psychological resistance by some to the reality of being mortal. It is found in the cultural resistance to aging. Think: Wrinkle creams and plastic surgery, meant to delay the reminders of the plain old reality we have to look at in the mirror.

Others philosophically think pushing back against the tide of aging is simply a matter of handling the mounting years with dignity: “Stay young and beautiful as long as you can.” “ You’re only as old as you feel.” This, I think, represents a philosophy provisionally embraced by those who have yet to face illness and loss that often comes with aging. More unbending reality.

The healthcare industry misleads us by supporting a fantasy that maybe we can soon replace every ailing part of the body, as if our body were a car kept running forever with continual replacement parts. It is not unnatural to imagine that, unless we are hit by a train, we can live forever, and conquer every disease.

Yet if some people lived forever, they would still not figure out what QUALITY of life really means. With no hint of mortality, there would be little motivation to find meaning in the latter half of life. I am lobbying for a deepened sense of life in contrast to the superficial unexamined life. I seek quality not quantity, where single moments of meaningful experiences are prized. 

"Life eternal", as a Christian concept, is not, I think, an experience in chronological time. The Greeks have a word" kairos" which means meaningful time, the right moment. It begins in the NOW when there are opportune moments of engagement or beauty with family and friends that transcend chronological time. Who knows where it ends?

These are not easy ideas to cope with, requiring all the wisdom we can muster.

       

My Blog is My New Publishing Outlet

As of April, 2017, I will no longer be seen on the pages of the Ft Myers News-Press. But , to continue to have an outlet for my thoughts, I am choosing to express myself here. I especially hope that friends and colleagues will occasionally visit these pages, read and react to what I have to say. 

  Now it seems inevitable that I would have to use this medium of communication I have patiently waded through the set-up process to learn just how things work. I will give you some basics for navigating the swamp located at this end of the blogesphere, in case you are a newbie, like me.
   When you first arrive at the edge of the blog spot, you will see my "published" articles, by date, situated on the  side of the main page (most recent appear first). You should not have to log into anything to see this, once you have followed the web address, https://WilliamRMorrow.blogspot.com. If you use the https:// part , all our communication is encrypted to meet the requirements of this day in age.   At the end of each of my postings, you will see a place for your contribution, "Post a comment" and a blank box in which to write your reactions, contributing ideas, comments, questions. Everyone who then visits my blog will see your comments. If you want your  comments to be private, you should not post here, but send me an email in the usual way: wmorrowmft@embarqmail.com.    On the right side of the main page is the "Blog Archive" of previous posts by me, which may not show up until you click on one. Though there will be more with time, rght now there are just a few, and they will all be visible as described above.   There may be other useful things around the page to click on, but as a basic blogcommentator you probably wont need them. There is a way for you, the visitor, to create a direct path to this blog so you can access it readily, but I haven't figured that out yet. Good luck and let me know your feedback. I want it to be user friendly.May you always stand on solid ground, but don't be afraid to get your feet wet! This could be fun as well as enlightening for both of us.