The Gift of Deep Breathing

Photo by Oluremi Adebayo

Let me start this blog post with a confession. 

I’m a chronic over-thinker. I always have been. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been privy to moments where I get so lost in my thoughts that I feel like I detach from the outside world. I’ve considered this a strength in many ways, as it has allowed me to harness my creative energy to express myself in countless forms; writing, music, and comedy mainly. However, this same strength is also equal parts a weakness. 

The problem with overthinking is that when we overthink, we can create false problems that we take from our inner worlds to our outer worlds. 

I didn’t realize how much of an over thinker I was until 2014, when it almost cost me something very near and dear.

In high school, high jump was my passion. I ate, slept and breathed the sport of high jump. I would lose myself in hours of old video footage watching the greats soar to unimaginable heights, then going to practice and trying to imitate what I saw them do. I would track down every great high jumper I could get a hold of and try to elicit secrets of the craft from them. In this way, I was able to win two state championships in Connecticut. 

However, one weekend before a competition, I found myself overthinking nearly every piece of the sport. I wanted to place first, so I began researching the competition. Who would I be jumping against? Who was the top rated jumper at the moment? What were the odds I would win? Pretty soon, I realized that I’d spent the better part of an hour on the floor in front of my computer screen obsessing over things I couldn’t control. 

And the worst part? My over-thinking had stressed me out to the point that I didn’t even want to compete anymore. My breathing was shallow, and I wanted to curl up in a ball and never think of the sport again. Knowing what I know now, I’m comfortable saying that my overthinking caused a panic attack. 

Weeks earlier, I’d picked up a book called Ten Percent Happier by a writer named Dan Harris who had had a panic attack on live television. The experience inspired him to do some self reflection, and he began a journey of mindfulness, and meditation became a key part of his routine. 

The book was fresh in my mind, so I began to meditate the only way I knew how – I took deep breaths until I felt my body return to a state of relaxation and my mind calmed down. 

That was in 2014, and since then, meditation has become a key part of my identity and daily routine.

In 2021, I set the ambitious goal of meditating everyday. Altogether, I think I missed around ten days. I do not consider myself a yogi, or an enlightened person by any means, but I do think that the experience was a transformative one which has influenced how I go about my life as a result. My meditation practice has taught me many lessons, some of which I want to reflect on in this blog post today. 

Non Reactivity 

One of the things that became evident to me as I started to meditate more regularly was that I became less reactive to the things around me and inside of me; my environment, my thoughts, and my emotions. In today’s world, our environments are over stimulating in nearly every way. There’s always some song or TV show playing in the background, a text message or email to answer, or new thing to buy which will satiate the nagging emptiness we all have. 

Meditating helped me learn how to identify less with the emotions I felt and not react to them immediately. The realization that I am not my emotions or my thoughts was a powerful one, and helped me to practice a healthy form of detachment from them. Thinking back to the moment in my life when I first started using meditation as a tool, it was because I was identifying too closely with my thoughts. The potential of failure was seemingly swarming around me. Breathing deeply lifted me out of the cycle of catastrophization that I had been overly identifying with. 

Buddhists refer to this principle as equanimity: mental calmness and composure, especially in difficult situations. One of the main deterrents of meditation is the fear of the thoughts that will come up when we are alone with our thoughts. For some people, this experience is so intense that it can cause anxiety. However, if you can learn to sit quietly with the troubling thoughts that we all have, the challenges of the outside world are more digestible. 

Engagement with Everyday Life 

When you meditate regularly, you start to notice things around you and engage more deeply with everyday life, things and ideas. The goal of meditation is to get out of your head, and into your body, and as a result, into the world around you. In the past, and sometimes still today,  I would get so wrapped up in my thoughts when I was with other people that I would stop being present and recede into the inner cocoon of thought. Our five senses and specifically our breath are the things that connect us most tangibly to the outside world. When I focus on breathing, I’m preoccupied with being present, which prevents me from overthinking. 

Deepened Creativity 

One of the most beneficial parts of meditation for me has been the deepened sense of creativity that I experience. 

Any creator or person who does something that is mentally demanding will tell you that most of their work happens in a flow state: a form of focus so profound that the outside world falls away. My meditation practice has made flow state more easily accessible. If we are experienced, we achieve flow state regularly when we meditate, as we are so in tune with our breath that every distraction becomes irrelevant. Knowing how to do this in a controlled environment has helped me to take the principles of meditation to other areas of my life. When I meditate, I typically set a timer and focus until it goes off. I’ve found that this can work with other areas of my life where I’m seeking productivity, such as my writing, making music, the gym or my day job. 

Emotional Balance

Since I started meditating, I’m comfortable saying that my life has become much more complex and demanding. I’ve lived in different places, met more people, and taken on more responsibilities. I think one of the things that prepared me for this was meditation – it taught me to access a level of calm within myself that I could apply to other areas of my life. And that’s not to say that I no longer become angry or upset or sad or scared. But, I feel like I’ve gotten better at recognizing that I’m feeling those things, rather than being alarmed by what I’m feeling, and becoming reactive to something I’m not fully aware of. I’ve learned this thing has a name – transmutation; when we take how we’re feeling, and transform the energy towards something more productive. One of my biggest weaknesses is that I can become quite agitated by things in daily life, whether it’s the idiot I’m dealing with at the time (joking), or a mistake I made. Learning to take the intense feelings that arise, and transform them into more productive feelings such as motivation or focus has helped me in my interactions with others.

Parting Thoughts 

I think one of the universe’s greatest gifts to mankind is our ability and right to stop and breathe fresh air. Taking a moment for ourselves and admiring the beauty and wonder of what is going on around us. This great adventure called life we’re all on is one hell of a mystery. There’s not really a guidebook, and all we have is the present moment. I hope you take some deep breathers today, so that you can better enjoy the present. 

Peace, 

Raman