Breathing out is an act of faith

My yoga for cancer chair class is a chatty one: it’s a small group and we sit in a circle, so it lends itself to conversation. In last week’s class the students spoke a lot about stress and anxiety, a fairly universal experience for cancer patients, although of course what triggers those feelings can vary from person to person.

There was a group discussion of different types of help people had received, such as through a stress management workshop that Maggie’s had run the week before, counselling and peer support they had received and books they had read. One common theme came from all these - that breath and movement are key to managing stress and anxiety.I explained a bit more to the group about the physiological response to stress, the effect that adrenaline has on the body and our nervous system and how we can self-regulate after a stressful event or thought through our movement practise and through controlling our breathing. This is something I go through in detail in the in-depth training course as stress management is such an important part of working with people with cancer.

One lady spoke about how she found the breathing quite challenging, that sometimes breathing more deeply with a longer exhale made her feel weird and a bit anxious. I checked in with her technique to make sure she wasn’t straining or holding the breath. She acknowledged she was typically a shallow breather and never fully exhaled the way I teach in class, and then I had a lightbulb moment!

Breathing out is an act of faith that you will receive another breath.

Part of our stress response can be to hold our breath: the body senses danger, takes a deep breath and braces keeping the breath very shallow as it cannot be sure that another breath will come. This can be a life saving reflex as one deep breath can give us time to assess the situation and take appropriate action to get out of danger. However, when stress is constant and there is no resolution, the body never gets to that feeling of safety and knowing that another breath is freely coming.

For my student, breathing out gave her anxiety because her body did not feel safe to let go. This may be something you have seen in some of your own students who may struggle to do a full yogic breath.

I suggested to her that her homework could be to practise simple breathing with an affirmation of her choosing to support her breathing. I will be interested to hear how she gets on when I see her next. Sometimes it is the most basic things that have the most profound impact on people.

What are your favourite practises for managing stress and anxiety?