Day after day, video meeting after call, I continue to ride this course with my neighbors by staying home and observe how the strange silence of my city is beginning to seem normal. The silence is beginning to infiltrate all aspects of life now.. I sense this because my anxious moments, however unsettling they may or may not be, now are simply just noticeable.
I used to suffer from much more extreme episodes of anxiety. I remember being in a lengthy panic attack in the days that followed Hurricane Sandy years ago that practically immobilized me. Anxiety is a family legacy that I spent most of my younger life overcompensating for… suppressing it so I could be convinced that I would not inherit the legacy. It looked like maintaining an appearance of calm or stoicism no matter what was happening. It felt like distancing myself from the intensity of feelings. It meant avoiding actions or behaviors that would risk confronting the unknown, fear, and the loss of control.
When I had my first recognizable panic attack, I was out of touch with my level of anxiety. I thought I was having a heart attack because the pain traveled up and down my arm. When it subsided and didn’t came back, I got that it was an alarming wake up call, and it wasn’t a physiological alert. I was not in touch with something wanting to surface by speaking through my visceral, bodily experience. And it was at that point in my life that I came upon Rebirthing Breathwork.
This was the method that taught me to let go of the intense need for control, or to believe that I had to lock myself down to grasp at safety (no pun intended). In the first couple of years of practice, I would continue to experience anxiety attacks in moments of extreme stress. And the breathwork trained me to breathe through it, not outside of it or against it. Simply through.
It taught me to experience the intensity of the emotional, psychological and physiological sensations caused by fear, when I was able to create a safe container for it. And to experience getting to the other side of it. Oddly enough, as I experienced the anxiety, I realized that I was finally fully embracing aliveness.
Those years were critical for learning how to take care of myself when vulnerable and afraid, and to understand my own resiliency and potential. Healing is always possible. The scary moments are the ones that can wake us to our own vitality and light.
Let’s focus on hope and healing. Even as we continue to face uncertainty in the day to day.
Join me in a joint breathwork and Reiki healing session this Thursday, April 9th beginning at 8pm. My dear friend, Caroline, will conduct a distance healing while I facilitate a 50-minute virtual breathwork session. Find a comfortable place to lay down in your home and enjoy an hour of taking gentle care of yourself.
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