Take a Different Kind of Breath: Uncommon Treatments for Panic Attacks
We’ve been going through our archives from the last few Guild seasons and stumbled upon this exchange we had with a man who reached out to us for help. Suffering from panic attacks and asthma, he sent us the following letter after reading a visionary teaching that came down on diaphragmatic breathing:
Dear Ones,
Last night I had another strong panic attack, the third sleepless night in a row, but I was able to stop the hyperventilation and let my breathing “sit down” by concentrating on the diaphragmatic part of my breathing. After about an hour my breathing was not audible anymore and I fell shortly asleep while sitting in a chair.
The reason why I stopped the breathing exercises was that they were too mechanical – even though they calmed me and changed my breathing. I would only desire them if there was a way to change them into a deep and intense prayer that would make me feel the everlasting Breath so that my whole breath would forevermore be wrapped in continuous prayer.
I am very tired and sick.
Love,
David
We wrote back:
Dear Brother,
Please do not avoid any kind of treatment that can help you, whether it is old fashioned or newly fangled meds or mechanical, boring behavioral interventions with clumsy contraptions. We personally have dropped the need to think we can beat dis-ease who always is ready to show how easily we are beaten by invisible viral matter that never flatters our will power, nasty microbes that escape every probe, damned allergens from hell’s wind, and all the creepy mind, body, social, and political particles that never cease to circulate and irritate.
We are writing you a prescription:
Take anything that can help. Damn well-being idealism. Damn over reliance on prayer. Damn everything except stupid breathing devices and idiotic inhalers and sweet unhealthy pastry tasties. Go get three Thai massages in a three-day period. Try out every fake medical device and do so with anyone crazier than you. Learn three Russian curse words and say them when you exhale during an asthma attack. As – th – ma. As the ma blames, the son must re-aim. Each morning you should throw 6-12 darts at a picture of the moon. See how many craters you hit. That is your number for the day. Do your best to be confused by what this daily number means but be attuned to discovering whether accidental meanings begin to emerge.
Breath rhymes with death. Life rhymes with strife. Number rhymes with dumber. You are too smart for your own good. Get dumber. Call a plumber to fix a faucet that does not need repair. When he says he can find nothing wrong, accept this as the medical diagnosis of your future that has forgotten your past. Drink more water. Then leak (piss) more often while remembering the plumber who can help make you dumber.
We pray you will find unexpected rest when you arrest your brilliant mind and find a healthy return to decadent cadence. Cadence is the key to discovery and forgetting about recovery.
Our dear Monsieur Pan-cake in Need of Re-spelling Pan-ic so You Are Thrown in the Frying Pan, please absorb this word into your pineal gland’s brass band: CADENCE.
Defining cadence:
The rhythmic flow of a sequence of sounds or words: the cadence of language; (in free verse) a rhythmic pattern that is nonmetrically structured;
the beat, rate, or measure of any rhythmic movement: The chorus line danced in rapid cadence;
the flow or rhythm of events, especially the pattern in which something is experienced: the frenetic cadence of modern life;
a slight falling in pitch of the voice in speaking or reading, as at the end of a declarative sentence.
Another prescription for you follows. Add this to the former intervention against popular convention:
Alter every cadence to allow any valence to follow. Regard cadence and valence as leaning the same way. Do not understand this bent angle other than it is a higher medical means of bringing you closer to your guardian angel angle. Changing the position of one letter alone can open your diaphragm wings and make them smoothly flutter rather than stutter your shutters. Feel free to imagine the right moment to say any of this to a dumbfounded plumber, a perplexed masseuse, a hexed Russian sturgeon that thinks it’s a surgeon, and a long ago talking mother who still isn’t listening to what makes sense when life’s most profound deep breath arrives as hallowed shallow nonsense.
Wishing that you trip on accidents of the higher kind.
Love,
Brad & Hillary
-The Keeneys, December 4, 2020