Circular Breathing

A hippy, a skeptic and a tie-dyed mung bean walked into a circular breathing session. I will finish the joke at the end but to put things in perspective I was the skeptic. The course I had embarked on offered to alleviate stress, give a smile to a person suffering from depression, and calm anxiety bringing a sense of total well being to the inner-self. Well, my inner-self was suffering from bouts of depression, extremely anxious, and generally feeling like I had been rolled through the wringer of an old barrel washing machine.

                  So I rolled myself up at 6pm on a Sunday night following a line of dreadlocked saffron orange and shades of green smocked souls into the Titirangi centre for body soul and mind. I knew something was amiss when I took off my not very vegan leather Doc’s, placing them next too, woven knitted sock-shoes, hemp sandals and woollen beige fake fur hug boots.  The next thing that alerted my atheist alarm bells was the singing in unison of songs that sounded a lot like Hare Krishna anthems.

                  20 minutes into session one of the instructors, an extremely attractive tall woman, with long legs that could not stay inside of her flowing transparent silky split skirt, gave us the benefits of the technique along with a little too much love yourself talk. She had me under a spell, my mind wandered and I wondered what she was doing after the session. My momentary attraction was brought to a halt when I realised her partner was the angelic singing, harmonic guitar playing guru with the man bun who had been bringing us together with group singing at the beginning.

                  When it came to technique on how to actually accomplish circular breathing I found the descriptions a little vague. Apparently, the technique was something you had to find in yourself without having a pause in-between breathing in and out breathing through your mouth.

After making ourselves comfortable on our yoga mats and pillows we settled into the rest of the time mastering this technique. Much to my horror while trying to breathe like a wheel and fall into a meditative state all I could hear was the rasping panting breaths of 30 other anxious depressed souls competing for speed, and depth of spiritual being to send themselves towards nirvana. After about 5 minutes of intensive hyperventilating, I did start to feel like the process was having some effect. After 15 minutes as the guitar playing guru chanted and his partner continued to walk around telling us to more to love ourselves I was being taken somewhere. My logical mind could not work out if it was the mass of oxygen I was forcing into my system from what was basically hyperventilating or oxygen deprivation from being in a closed room full of 30 people doing this that was causing the effect.

                  Anyway, effects felt, a shaking of the limbs started not unlike and mild epileptic fit , a sense of pains in my neck abdomen stomach leg, got a lot worse, then I stretched them out and the pain seemed to dissipate leaving my whole body feeling supple and heavy in the limbs. My emotions did reach a crescendo about the time the woman was telling us we were coming down from some mountain, with a little tear sneaking out down my cheek. I didn’t feel anything like rebirthing which I was glad of. There was enough effect that the skeptic had left the room. All in all by the end of the session I did gain both physical and mental well being from the whole event.

                  The end of the event had us all holding hands, a little uncomfortable with strangers at first, but I settled into it just before my hands got too sweaty to continue. I gave some comments to the group of the effects that it had on me which were not nearly as ornate as the comments that followed. It seemed from what I was listening to that possibly someone had dropped some LSD into the cool aid which I wasn’t a party to. Well, each to his own, that was not the effect it had on me and when I looked at the people saying it I sort of wondered if they wanted the LSD effect why didn’t they just take LSD. So if you can handle a bit of stepping out of your comfort zones, being in a room with rasping crying hippies and relieving at least some of your anxiety give it a go.

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Back to the joke. A hippy, a skeptic and a tie-dyed mung bean walk into a room. The hippy loved the room, the sceptic left the room eventually realising that part of him would stay as he was really a hippy on the inside and no-one couldn’t tell the difference when he took his unfashionable leather shoes off. And the tie-dyed mung-bean. Well, don’t be silly. Mung-beans can’t walk. They are vegetables. What’s wrong with you? Are you on acid?