Saved By The Breath | The Breathing Space Podcast #1

In this first episode of The Breathing Space, I share a glimpse into my story. Learn how I went from stressed out, self destructive, smoking asthmatic with a drink problem to sober, (relatively) calm and happy, valuing myself considerably more than my younger self would have ever imagined possible. The secret to my recovery? Learning to breathe! Breathing well transformed my life when it enabled me to relax, to accept and be with my emotions, to sleep and to manage life's challenging moments. Learning good breathing, through Yoga teacher training, was a complete game changer for me in my life. I am passionate about sharing the healing power of the breath with others, and when you hear my story, you will understand why.

Transcript

What can an ex-smoking asthmatic teach you about the importance of breathing?

Well,

Hopefully quite a lot,

As learning to breathe well was certainly transformational for this ex-smoking asthmatic.

Stay tuned to hear how my life was changed when I learned to breathe,

And how maybe yours can be too.

You're listening to The Breathing Space with me,

Esther Nagel.

The Breathing Space is a place to explore the transformational power of yoga to create health,

Happiness and inner peace.

Take a breath with me,

Relax and enjoy your time here in The Breathing Space.

And let's breathe and grow together.

When I was a child,

I remember looking at cigarettes my Nana used to smoke.

And wondering what they tasted like,

Thinking about trying them,

But knowing full well that if I did,

I would cough,

I would feel ill and that my parents would know that I tried smoking.

Because I had asthma and I knew that smoking wasn't a good idea.

When I was nine,

I knew that smoking wasn't a good idea.

I knew it wasn't a good idea for anyone.

My brother and I had absolutely terrorized my father into giving up smoking when I probably was about nine.

But I knew it was a particularly bad idea for a little girl who had asthma.

I was diagnosed when I was about seven or eight,

I think,

Like many other children.

And I grew up knowing that I had this condition that meant that sometimes my lungs didn't work,

Sometimes I couldn't breathe and sometimes it got really scary.

Asthma is a frightening thing to grow up with because you know that at any moment your lungs might stop working and you might stop being able to breathe.

It's pretty scary.

Having an asthma attack is pretty scary.

Asthma is pretty scary.

So nine-year-old me knew that smoking wasn't a good idea.

But unfortunately,

17-year-old me forgot.

And 17-year-old me decided it was a really good idea to start smoking when she was angry with her boyfriend.

She never told her boyfriend because that would have been,

I don't know,

There would have been some point to it maybe.

But every time I had an argument with my boyfriend when I was 17,

I would sneak off,

Buy some cigarettes and smoke because I knew he wouldn't like it.

He didn't like smoking.

His mother smoked.

And he really didn't like it.

I think maybe there was some part of me was hoping he'd catch me so that he would then end the relationship because we argued a lot.

We were very happy.

But I smoked.

And for a long time,

I told myself that I was only a very casual smoker.

And for a very long time,

I probably was only a very casual smoker.

But then I started smoking a little bit more regularly.

Saturday night would come around and I'd go out and I'd buy a packet of 10 cigarettes and I'd smoke a few and then I'd throw the rest away.

And then I'd go out on Friday night and I'd buy some cigarettes and I'd smoke a few and I'd throw the rest away.

And eventually,

I started noticing that during the week I wanted to smoke.

And so I started.

Now,

This might not be the most sensible thing to have done,

But if I was to tell you that by the time I was a pretty much a regular smoker,

I'd also discovered that drinking lots of alcohol would get me drunk enough that I didn't have to think about the things that were causing me huge distress in my life.

That I didn't like myself particularly,

To say the least.

I was actually awash with self-loathing and real shame about who I was and how I was showing up in the world.

And I'd also discovered drugs.

And I was pretty much on a,

Let's see how much I can abuse my body before it collapses on me,

Michelle.

And that was when I was 20.

By the time I was 20,

I was a regular smoker,

I was displaying definite signs of alcoholism,

I was taking lots of drugs,

And I was very much on the route of self-destruction.

Very unhappy young woman.

And I carried on like that for a very long time.

It became a bit of a standing joke among my friends that my essentials for a night out would involve my keys,

It would involve my cigarettes,

My lighter and my ventilator.

I would very often reach for my ventilator mid-smoke,

Not putting out the cigarettes so that I could breathe,

But taking a puff of my inhaler so I could continue to smoke,

Particularly if what I was smoking was a joint.

I smoked a lot of joints.

I smoked a lot of cigarettes as well,

But my real love was marijuana in time,

Because marijuana not just gave me the hit of the nicotine and all the other things that I was getting from smoking cigarettes,

But it also numbed my already numbed emotions a little more.

It really enabled me to stop feeling.

What I was fighting with isn't for discussion in this podcast,

There were lots of things going on in my head at the time when I was young and developing these self-sabotaging and addictive behaviours.

But the interesting thing about,

As I look back at my life from where I am now at age 45,

Is the way that I,

It's almost as if I targeted my weakest point,

And decided that I was going to go for my weakest.

It's almost as if I went for my jugular,

Really,

In targeting my lungs by smoking heavily.

I was abusing and destroying my lungs,

Which were already fragile.

It's almost as if,

Now looking back with hindsight,

It's almost as if I knew that was my quickest route to self-destruction.

I didn't consciously decide that,

But I think that that's what was going on.

I'd grown up knowing that my lungs were weak and that I had an issue with breathing.

So if you're looking for a quick way out that isn't that quick,

The easiest way is to target the weakest part of yourself.

And so I did.

So I was a very heavy smoker for a very long time,

20 years in fact,

Smoking and drinking,

Drinking to the point of oblivion,

Drinking to the point where I forgot most of the previous night.

I'd wake up in the morning and I'd have to spend a significant amount of time most mornings trying to piece together the night before,

Sometimes wondering how I got home,

Sometimes wondering who the person next to me was,

Sometimes wondering where I was,

Sometimes often wondering who I'd upset,

What damage I'd caused,

Who I needed to apologise for and how I was going to make it right.

And very often I would decide that the easiest thing to do was to just not speak to the people that I'd been with the previous night or hide for a few weeks until hopefully everyone had forgotten about it.

And that was not really a great way to live,

I can assure you.

But that's the way I lived.

Deepening in my addiction,

Deepening in my smoking habits,

Deepening in my self-loathing and my self-destruction.

My tendencies to self-destruction applied to all aspects of my life,

Financially,

Professionally,

Emotionally,

Romantically.

Everything was a mess in my life.

And I didn't even realise a lot of the time that I was in a mess because this was just my life.

I lived a chaotic,

Stressful,

Never-ending,

Drama-filled life.

And I just thought that was normal.

I just thought that was me.

I was this crazy,

High-maintenance,

Difficult person to be and I was a crazy,

Difficult to be with person as well.

My friends,

I'm sure,

Were often challenged by my behaviour.

I lost friends because of the way I behaved.

Sometimes because I would just walk away and stop talking to them because I was ashamed of myself.

Sometimes they would just give up on me.

And I can't say I blame them because I was difficult.

But this kind of self-destructive behaviour can't last forever.

It's going to have to end at some point somehow.

Obviously,

Nobody's life lasts forever,

Whether they're on a one-way mission to hell or not.

But life seemed to conspire to make me change.

In 2013,

I began the year feeling very optimistic about the year.

I had just turned 40 and I spent New Year's Eve with my best friend.

We toasted the year and we decided that 2013 was going to be our year.

It was going to be the year that everything started to work for us.

She had just come out of a marriage that had not worked.

I had just turned 40 and had decided that I was going to salt my life out.

And,

Unbeknown to me,

That's exactly what was going to happen.

But it wasn't going to happen easily and it wasn't going to happen just because I decided that was going to happen.

It took an awful lot of pain,

An awful lot of tears and an awful lot of feeling like my life was over before my life started to improve.

So from the optimism of January 1st,

Within a fortnight,

I was in a terribly stressful work situation that wasn't of my causing.

I was in a very difficult relationship with my ex-partner and we were at war and that was extremely challenging to say the least.

We discovered rather dramatically that another family member had been hiding a drinking problem and mental health issues from us for a very long time.

This kind of rocked my world because I was looking at him thinking,

I'm sure this is meant to be me.

Because I didn't,

Although I didn't really accept my drinking problems,

I kind of knew they were there as well.

So I was watching all that from the sidelines while also looking in a metaphorical mirror and wondering what on earth was going on in my own life.

And then we discovered that my mum had cancer and while she's fine now,

That was,

As you can imagine,

That was very challenging.

So within the space of six months,

Everything that I treasured in my life felt very,

Very rocky,

Very uncertain and it felt like life was just shifting from underneath me.

I was really struggling to cope.

The only coping mechanisms I had were smoking,

Drinking,

Crying,

Complaining to my friends and smoking marijuana.

And listening to loud music,

Very loud,

And shouting at the world.

The world never listened,

The world didn't really care.

So in August of that year,

I was in a new job,

Which I would have loved the year before,

But which I felt hopelessly out of my depth and given my emotional state.

And I fell apart.

I'd been needing to fall apart for a very,

Very long time.

And I finally fell apart.

It was all thanks to a Queens of the Stone Age song,

Which had kind of triggered me into seeing just what a state I was in.

The song I Appear Missing from the album Like Clockwork,

After me listening to it possibly about a hundred times in the space of a fortnight,

Suddenly it made sense in the context of my life.

I realized that I was feeling missing from my life.

I felt lost.

I didn't know who I was.

I didn't know where I was.

I didn't know what I was doing.

And I felt like I was drifting through life,

Utterly,

Utterly lost to myself.

And that realization was very painful at the time,

But it actually triggered a breakdown,

Which sounds agonizing.

And it was when I gave up my job.

I did it through barely,

Barely intelligible sobs over the phone.

I quit my job.

I never went back and I just walked away from a very well paid,

Very cool job.

But I couldn't do it.

I couldn't cope.

I couldn't manage.

I needed a break.

I needed a break from life.

I couldn't take a break from life.

So I quit my job.

And in the next few months,

I acted out every crazy idea I had.

Every bit of madness that was in me seemed to come hurtling out.

I had a very,

Very erratic,

Very alcohol sodden couple of months when I barely slept and made all kinds of mad decisions,

Most of which I regretted about three weeks later.

But I was in turmoil.

I was in free fall,

Nursing my mom through her cancer and trying to deal with everything else that was going on in my life.

And I was not really keeping it together,

But I was trying my best.

Throughout the falling apart,

I realized that I needed to start thinking about my future.

I needed to do something because I was the single mother of two young boys.

I had an older son as well,

Who was grown up.

He was grown up at the time.

He wasn't living with me then.

I had two young boys who needed me to look after them.

One was 13 and one was three.

And they needed me to pull myself together and think about what I was going to do for money.

And I decided that the best thing to do would be to be a yoga teacher,

Because that would mean I would be calm and peaceful and relaxed.

I loved yoga.

I'd be going to yoga for about six years at this point,

I think.

And I loved the physical postures.

I loved the way it made me feel relaxed.

I loved the fact that it made my body feel good.

I hated the breathing exercises.

I couldn't breathe.

I couldn't breathe through my nose because as well as asthma,

I also have a dust allergy.

So my nose was always locked up.

And so I really struggled with the breathing exercises.

I hated that.

I really found them difficult.

They used to make me feel quite angry.

But I decided I wanted to be a yoga teacher.

And as luck could have it,

Or as we have often discussed,

It was just the time was the stars were aligning and things were working out as they needed to.

A local yoga teacher who I didn't know started advertising the first ever teacher training course.

And I signed up.

I believe I might have been the first person to contact her about this training course.

I signed up and as soon as I made the decision that I was going to train to be yoga teacher,

I felt significantly more relaxed.

I felt calm as if I knew I'd made the right decision.

So a few months later,

I went to my first teacher training lesson and I went in this wired.

I was still wired.

I was still stressed.

I was still highly strong.

I was still completely on edge.

I was still a mess.

But I was positive and I was excited and I was looking forward to learning how to teach postures,

Because that's all I knew of yoga really was the postures.

And I thought I knew yoga.

And it took me about three hours to realize that I actually knew very little about yoga because all I knew was the postures.

As I started to look through the course materials,

I started to see that this might actually change my life,

That actually this was going to do a little bit more than teach me how to teach postures.

I started to get excited about the potential of learning to breathe,

Even though I knew that I struggled with it.

I knew I was going to have to figure it out.

So I was getting very excited about the prospect that maybe I'd be able to give up smoking.

At this point,

I wasn't really accepting that I had a drinking problem,

But I knew I couldn't give up smoking and that I needed to.

I was advised to give up taking dairy,

To give up eating dairy products to help reduce the mucus production in my nose.

So I did.

And within about a week of giving up dairy,

I was able to breathe through my nose.

And I was able to consistently breathe through my nose.

The instances of the blocked nose now are rare.

And I rarely have trouble breathing through my nose.

And as soon as I was able to breathe through my nose,

I was able to understand the purpose of the breathing because it helped me to relax.

I was suddenly able to relax.

I was suddenly able to sit quietly and focus on my breath.

I was able to sleep.

What new novelty this was,

To be able to sleep.

I hadn't been able to sleep properly since I was a little girl.

I got scared by seeing a glimpse of what turned out to be a spoof horror film.

But it had really made an impact on me.

And I suffered with insomnia since I was a little girl.

But I was finally able to sleep.

I was able to sleep without alcohol.

I was able to relax without marijuana.

I was able to be in the company of me and not get caught up in hours and hours and hours of self-loathing and inner critics screaming blue murder at me.

This was quite a revelation.

And the revelations just kept coming and coming and coming because the more I was able to breathe and the more I processed my past,

I processed my emotions,

The more I was able to let go of the self-loathing,

Of the pain,

Of everything that had happened to me in my past.

All the bad decisions that I'd made,

All the times when other people had hurt me,

All the times when my life had gone wrong.

And maybe throughout this podcast,

I'll tell you some more about that.

But that's not for now.

I was able to let go of a lot of pain and put a few demons to bed and forgive not just other people but myself and make peace with what my life had become and who I was and where I was.

I started to need alcohol less.

I started to need cigarettes less.

I started to notice that actually I preferred the mornings when I woke up and I hadn't smoked the night before and I hadn't drunk the night before.

And I started to like the way my lungs felt when I spent time learning,

Practicing breathing rather than the way they felt when I had a cigarette or a joint.

As I cut down my drinking and cut down my smoking,

The aftermath of those things became so much worse.

Hangovers when you're 40 and you suddenly cut down your drinking after years of very heavy drinking suddenly become excruciating.

Maybe they always were but I just stopped noticing.

I know that I would be groggy when I was hungover in the past but I never felt like I wanted to just lie on my sofa and pray for death,

Which is what kind of happened as I was reducing how much I was drinking.

And this one morning,

October the 12th,

2014,

I had such a good night the night before with my friend.

We'd had such fun.

We'd been awake till about 6 o'clock in the morning,

Or I had.

We'd been listening to The Beatles all night long most of the night.

We booked tickets to see Peter Gabriel performing the full album of So.

But it turned out that we hadn't because we were both so drunk we thought we'd booked them but it turned out we hadn't.

Unfortunately we found out in time to be able to get them.

But we'd had a really good night.

I'd had so much fun.

We talked and talked and talked and talked and talked.

We'd had so many laughs.

We'd been dancing.

It was a really fun night.

I'd drunk everything.

I'd drunk all the wine.

I'd drunk all the cider.

I even found half a bottle of whisky in the back of the cupboard that my friend had left a few months earlier and I'd drunk that.

I hated whisky.

Hated it.

But I drank it.

And we'd smoked lots and lots and lots.

And then the next morning when I was lying on my study,

I could barely move.

I couldn't do any of the things I planned to do.

I'd wanted to go out for a walk.

I'd wanted to do some study.

I'd wanted to be able to enjoy life.

I'd wanted to practice yoga.

There'd have been so many things I planned to do that day and all I could do was lie on my sofa with my eyes closed trying to drink water without feeling like I was going to throw it up and think.

And I thought so hard that day.

And I reflected on how awful I felt that day compared to how good I felt the previous day.

And I made a decision that I wasn't going to do this anymore.

I didn't need to numb my emotions anymore because learning to breathe and learning to relax and learning to process how I felt meant that I could actually just feel my emotions instead of numbing them.

I didn't have to numb anything anymore.

So why on earth was I getting myself so drunk?

By this point I'd processed and I'd accepted the fact that I had a drinking problem.

And I knew what I'd been doing all of these years that I'd been drinking to hide from the way I felt about myself.

But I didn't need to do that anymore because actually I liked myself now.

So why was I still trying to kill myself?

So that morning,

Or probably that afternoon,

I don't suppose I saw much of the morning,

But that day I decided I wasn't going to drink the following weekend.

I wasn't drinking in the week by this point anyway because I was doing my yoga practice in the week.

So I wasn't going to drink the following weekend.

And the following weekend I stayed sober all weekend.

I went for walks,

I did yoga,

I played with my son.

We had a lovely weekend and I really focused on how good I felt being sober,

Not being hungover.

And then because I'd enjoyed it so much I did it again the following weekend.

And again.

And again.

And then in mid-November my brother got married and he was very surprised when I told him that I'd made the decision that I was going to not drink wine during his wedding.

Because I know full well that had I had one glass of wine I would have probably drunk about two bottles.

Because it was that kind of wedding where you lift your hand up and a waiter comes and fills your glass.

I would have drunk loads and I wouldn't have known what I was doing.

So I enjoyed my brother's wedding.

I remember my brother's wedding.

I woke up in the morning feeling amazing.

And that morning I decided I preferred sobriety.

That there was nothing that I dealt with in the months of sobriety that I couldn't deal with.

And I was going to stay sober.

And I was learning to breathe,

I was learning to relax.

I was still doing my yoga teacher training at this point.

And the breathing practices that we were learning were helping and making it easier and easier for me to stay sober.

So that was four years ago.

I haven't had a drop of alcohol since then.

And because alcohol and cigarettes and marijuana always went so well together I haven't touched those either since then.

So four years of sobriety has been very largely thanks to learning to breathe.

Because without being able to breathe I wouldn't have been able to relax.

I wouldn't have been able to sleep.

I wouldn't have been able to feel my emotions and manage during the moments when life gets difficult.

Because life does get difficult.

We're living in the modern 21st century.

You've only got to open the paper and life gets difficult.

So it's still difficult.

I don't live a very happy,

Easy life.

But I have my breath.

And as long as I can take a deep breath I can cope with anything.

So that's the purpose of this podcast.

Because I am so passionate about how much learning to breathe can change your life.

If it can help me give up drinking and give up smoking after over 20 years of slow suicide.

Because that's what it was.

If I can do that through breathing then I honestly believe that anything is possible.

It is possible to accomplish anything.

My friend gave me a badge yesterday that says anything is possible if you've got the nerve.

And I think anything is possible if you just take the breaths.

Because you take the breaths you can think straight,

You can be calm,

You can approach life calmly and at peace in yourself.

Anything is possible.

Wherever you are in life right now it can be different.

It can be what you want it to be.

And it might not feel like it.

It might feel hopeless.

You might feel like you can't change.

You might feel that nothing is possible.

Nothing that you want is possible for you.

And I understand that.

I feel like that sometimes as well.

I remind myself that when I was 39 I would have thought sobriety was impossible.

I would have thought that giving up smoking was impossible.

And I did.

I'd given up.

But I know now that it is possible.

So this podcast is going to be my attempt to share with you some breathing techniques,

Some knowledge about breathing to help you to learn to appreciate your lungs,

To be able to breathe better and to be able to realize that life,

As long as you're still breathing,

Life is here for the taking.

Every breath you take nourishes your body and is an invitation to release and let go of everything that you think is not possible for you.

Because whenever you've got a full lung full of air,

It feels like you can't take anything else in.

But then you can let go and you can breathe in some new air.

You can always change your life.

You can change your life in the next breath if you choose to.

So that's me for this episode of this podcast,

The Breathing Space.

And I hope that it's been interesting for you.

Most of the episodes aren't going to be about me.

They're going to be about you and about how we can learn together.

I'll be sharing what I've learned about the breath.

I'll be sharing what I've learned about life.

But it's not all going to be my story because my story is just a story.

We've all got stories.

I'd like to hear your stories as well.

So do feel free to email me if you'd like to share your stories.

Esther at Balance and Breathe dot co dot UK and do subscribe to the podcast so that you can hear the next episodes that come out.

And please rate my podcast if you have that facility on your podcast provider.

Because the more the better ratings that I get,

The more people are going to hear.

And who knows,

There might be something in this podcast that could change somebody's life.

It certainly changed my life.

The story that I'm sharing here today.

So thank you for listening.

I hope that you've enjoyed it.

I hope you've got something from it.

And I look forward to speaking with you again really soon in The Breathing Space.

Have a lovely day and don't forget to breathe.

Bye.

Thank you for listening to this episode of The Breathing Space.

I hope that it's been valuable to you and that you've been able to take some useful learning from it.

Please don't forget to subscribe and rate the podcast if you enjoyed it and do come back for the next episode.

You can view the archives of the podcast as they appear at balance and breathe dot co dot UK forward slash The Breathing Space,

Where I will be sharing all the episodes on the show notes from the podcast.

Or you can listen in your favorite podcast supplier.

I'll be back soon.

And I look forward to speaking to you in The Breathing Space.

Namaste.

Reviews

Thank you for this. I needed it today. I am struggling with covid-induced asthma which is progressing and worsening, leaving me confused and afraid. Your podcast helped me to feel not alone and has given me ideas to try- one breath at a time. Very grateful. Thank you 🙏

This is just what I need to hear today, thank you for the inspiration 🙏

Truly heartfelt, diolch! I very much look forward to future episodes.

Thank you for sharing your story. I’m so happy for you as you really turned things around. I hope your story will inspire others 💖🙏🏼

I loved hearing about this positive transformation. I spent far too many years abusing my body and mind. I really felt uplifted by hearing this. Thank you