Lungs

Hopefully once school starts my writing will be more current; less musing on the past...
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I was born three months premature, and from the second I was in the doctor’s hands, from November 1988 until March 1989, I had slim white tube go from a ventilator directly into my too-tiny lungs. The wailing cry most babies set up after birth, to tell you that they’re scared and healthy and here? I probably never had that, my mother doesn’t remember. I suppose my first breath was the spring they took me out of the incubator to go home—still only 4 pounds after months of IV feeding. A month later I came right back, with pneumonia complicated by infection-related asthma… Of course I don’t remember that, but I can imagine what it feels like: drowning. I already what bronchitis and asthma attacks feel like, like a fist clamping down to stop your lifeblood, like there are holes inside and no breath makes it to the bottom of you. To have water in them, overflowing each miniscule aveoli in my already bird-like body, doctors with sandbags and buckets, as though your lungs were a lifeboat and the perpetual wheeze and gurgle of a five month old child the winds of a storm.

In folk medicine the lungs are where sadness lie: in the winter, we get lung-sicknesses when we lose the light of the sun; we stop breathing from grief… I still feel sadness there, between my ribs, in the heart chakra (which rules the lungs). It’s a spiked flower opening, a pulsing loneliness, like all the holes in me from sickness, all that pain leaks from one rent in my heart. And what am I sad for? Regret over clothes and my lost grandparents; why the hell don’t boys love me back; my mother’s sister; my elbows don’t straighten; disease; failure to accept what is: they bang up against each other in the dearth of my chest.

Though I’ve struggled to breathe my whole life, two gifts, music and yoga, helped me overcome that. I was told I’d never master the flute because of my breath, the asthma, yet I worked so hard at it I forgot about those handicaps. Each practice I strove for the full, perfect breath, one that fills from the belly to the tip-top of the breastbone. I learned how to ration, how and when for quick Inhalations and big gulps of air, how to preciously siphon it out, note by note. The headache of held breath, the push of lungs to get out that final trill. I was absolutely grateful to realize how precious the flow of air is, how glad I was to find some beautiful use for it.. After I began playing the flute, I rarely had asthma attacks and never got bronchitis or any other terrible lung trouble again—amazing, the doctor’s said, after ten years of breathing hell. However, I still had terrible fatigue and moodiness (partially the RA), still couldn’t get a good breath all the time, still hyperventilated terrible when startled or anxious…

But then came yoga: oh, yoga. The first six months of my practice, while weirdly uncomfortable and painful, at least taught me the three-part breath. It was joy, epiphany, orgasm, to realize that there was a set way to get these perfect, blissful breaths all the time, to realize that this is what we are entitled to, that full lungs are not just random, fateful happenstance! And it all clicked in the last few months at the new studio, how to breath with and into movement, to wrap the breath around you like a cloak… It has truly been a blessing, to realize how blessed I am, to get so much more life and tapas into my system. Ironically, my first breath was a doorway to pain, sickness, and life, all at once, now my breath is the first step to health, the first step to nourishing my grieving lungs, to breathing with the full body like tall plants do, turning to face the sun.