Cross-Training Body Mind Emotions Spirit | Rachael R. Resch

It’s weird to be back on all the asthma meds again — high levels of prednisone and doing the nebulizer four times a day — after all these years baruch hashem of feeling so healthy.  But I bless all these drugs which allow me to live.  There are big differences now, compared to when I was sick in Portland for seven years.

Even though being unable to breathe leads to anxiety, this time I have been steady, grounded and centered.

Somehow, for the first time in my life, just by sustaining my commitment to possibility, I have discovered how to weep in such a way as not to aggravate my precarious breathing situation — very deeply and very quietly.  Grief is associated with the lungs, and this session of Martin Prechtel’s school, Bolad’s Kitchen, in particular was more grief-stricken than usual.

Somehow, for the first time in my life, I have become willing — although definitely not desiring — to die of lung problems, of which, before, I had been terrified.

 

 

 

 

 

The Well of Grief

Those who will not slip beneath
the still surface on the well of grief

turning down to its black water
to the place that we can not breathe

will never know
the source from which we drink
the secret water cold and clear

nor find in the darkness
the small gold coins
thrown by those who wished for something else

— David Whyte

Even though Martín has been teaching this for so many years, for the first time I could understand and feel it on the inside, in body and soul:

I feel the utter willingness to die at my appointed hour in order to feed something else, hitting the ground as beautifully as I can, making an echo as big as possible in order to feed a time beyond my own.

Somehow, I could feel the truth and the nobility of it, like a great horse beneath my body carrying me either to the other side or through the current conundrum into more life, either way, her big muscles, natural self and snorting breaths carrying me in whatever form through the world.

Consequently, all three times I have gone to ER I have dressed in my nomadic gypsy finest — velvet, leather, silk, red shawl, beads (the indigenous version of “It doesn’t matter how you, feel it’s how you look that counts — and, dahling, you look mahelous!”) so that if my appointed hour came, the seed pod of my being would be decked out, ready with nourishment for the holy and ready to sprout into the next thing, and if the appointed hour passed me by, then I could just be stylin’ and perhaps bring a little more pleasure and and little more hope to myself and those around me.

Throughout this time, I’ve been silently singing Rabbi David Zeller’s (zt’l) “I Am Alive”  to which he wrote the lyrics as he was dying in 2007.  I sing it as a prayer to ride, and now that I’m home I’m learning the Hebrew (thanks, Avara), and look forward to just resting as he sings it to me on my iPod.

You can listen to some of it at http://davidzeller.org/aliveness/ And you will hear it in Nia classes at The DanceSpace this week and next.

I Am Alive

Lie-lie-lie-lie, lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie.
I am alive.
And who is this aliveness I am?
Is it not the holy, blessed one?

Lie-lie-lie-lie, lie-lie-lie-lie
Ha lo chai ani.
U mi hu ha chai  yut sheli?
Ha lo ha borei yit barah.

— David Zeller, zt’l

The lungs are called the bronchial tree.  They are a Tree of Heaven because the tree is rooted in the air above.  As we breathe, the air flows down — through the trunk of the throat and bronchii into the center of the chest, nestling up next to the heart.  From there, bronchial tree branches deeply into the body.  The smallest twigs are called bronchioles, and the end of which are the alveoli, where gas exchange takes place.  The alveoli look like bunches of grapes!  There are about 600 million alveoli in the body.

Nestled underneath the lungs and heart is the muscle of the respiratory diaphragm.  These strong double parachutes push the air in and out of our lungs about 25,000 times per day.  Their tendon attaches on the lumbar spine.

The diaphragm is the muscle that breathes, laughs and weeps.  Breathes, laughs and weeps.

Martín Prechtel tells us the Tzutzujil Maya of the highlands of Guatamala advocate laughing out of one eye and crying out of the other.

Out of the fruit of the alveoli, the clusters of grapes inside the chest, we can add our joy, laughter and tears to the mix as we crush the grapes with our feet, the hands that touch the Earth, and make ourselves, body, mind, heart and spirit, into god’s fine wine to feed the heart of the world.

(Second in a series about healing pneumonia and asthma.)