The Latest Huge Surprise: Breathing

I’ve discovered breathing.

Obviously I’ve been breathing my whole life, thankfully. And I plan on continuing doing so. Good stuff, highly recommend it.

However, I didn’t really appreciate breathing until, oh, two or three days ago. I’ve mentioned elsewhere some of my ongoing fun-n-games with pancreas and liver inflammation. As always, I’ve been trying to find some way of giving those organs a break – there’s always something.

Well, breathing appears to be the answer, in a big way. It’s absolutely amazing – I’ve been struggling with wretched, flaming stomach pain just under the sternum bone (starting about an inch or two under the Xiphoid) that radiates to my back, and can get truly excruciating at times. Since August 2021 – six months.

A few days ago, I was talking to my brother, and he asked if I had access to hyperbaric oxygen therapy. While the answer is effectively “no,” for me here, I started thinking about it, and realized that I could at least approximate some of the benefits by looking into breathing healing – something I’d glanced at before, but only knew a tiny bit about.

I gave it a try. I was absolutely blown away.

Here’s what I found:

First, you can youtube any amount of very helpful videos on this topic, e.g.. People have been doing this for thousands of years; very cool.

Second, I use a pulse oximeter (that thing they put your finger into at the Doc’s office) to measure my O2 levels in realtime. I discovered that the biggest factor for me was to make sure that I exhaled everything – that I cleared out the stale air to make way for new air. That drove my oxygen sat up to 99-100 consistently.

A footnote to this is slow down – the slower the better when breathing, and breath rhythmically. Pause when you get to the top and bottom of your breath, and let the air flow in and out. Also, footnote #2, breathe through your nose, at least on the inhale.

Third, I lie down on my stomach (on days when I have too much spleen/pancreas/liver pain, I roll a bit to one side by pulling my leg up – also seems to help loosen the Sphincter of Oddi when the right leg is pulled up, as in this picture). (You could also kneel down beside your bed and lie on the bed halfway – I do that occasionally too).

[1] quick footnote – occasionally, when it’s really intense, I still have to give my SOB a simultaneous massage while doing this – but it always does the trick.

Breathing in this position is magic – literally, my angry panky/heebyGB back pain will disappear in about 60 seconds. Not only that, but – and, take it for what it is, just a “feeling” – after doing this at least 5-15x a day, I feel much better much quicker than otherwise. That’s just my feeling – but trust me, at this point, I’m paying close attention to things like this.

The beauty of this is that you can do what I’ve taken to calling “intentional breathing” pretty much anywhere – on a zoom call, during a bath, in the car, wherever.

I’m incredibly impressed with the results – I didn’t expect that breathing intentionally would be such a big deal, and I wish I had started this about 6 months ago – make it 6 years ago!

*Update: No doubt someone might be reading, thinking: “but wait a minute – aren’t you supposed to avoid lying down for at least an hour after you eat?” (to avoid gastroparesis). Yes, but I lie down pretty much right away, for about 3-5 minutes (I just say a decade or two of the rosary), and then get up again. I’ve had no problems with gastroparesis thus far.