Pranayama During a Pandemic
Many people pass in and out of the back of my ambulance with a variety of chief complaints. The 63-year-old male complaining of chest pain or the 81-year-old female with difficulty breathing is such examples. Despite their differences in race, gender, age, or chief complaint, they all share one similar symptom, panic. We all suffer anxiety; it just depends on where on the spectrum you sit and whether or not you decide to treat yourself pharmacologically or not. As a paramedic, my job is rooted in the drugs of western medicine. I have medications that will speed your heart up, slow your heart down, or stop it temporarily. While all of these drugs (including those currently being prescribed) are highly effective, they are only short-acting. They require continual refills, updated dosages, and new prescriptions. As a yoga teacher, I attempt to tap into that which can naturally heal and whose effects you have constant access to, your breathing. In an age where panic and anxiety are at an all-time high, the need for a breath practice has never been greater, and who knows, it might just save you the most expensive Uber ride of your life.
Pranayama, as many of you know, is one of the eight limbs of yoga. Simply put, this word refers to one's ability to control the breath. What might not be apparent to you is its uses off the mat; consider within the context of an emergent medical situation. Your breathing is a vital part of how your body responds to crisis. Most of the time, you don't think about your breathing (outside of when your yoga teacher tells you how to breathe). Your breathing is a compensatory mechanism when the sympathetic or parasympathetic nervous system is triggered (that ancient part of your brain that assumes you're about to run away from a sabretooth tiger possibly). Physiologically the sympathetic nervous system responses will cause an increase in heart rate, blood pressure, and fresh oxygen to rush to the muscles getting them ready to take flight or fight. Now consider yourself as my 81-year-old female having a CHF (congestive heart failure) exacerbation. As her heart (pump) essentially "dies," the fluid and blood which once freely circulated through the body become backed up, specifically in the lungs. In the emergent phase of this crisis, the solution was pretty straightforward, get her to slow her breathing down and reduce the workload on the heart. Effective breath coaching combined with continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) (and a little bit of Nitro) managed the exacerbation and panic. Also, for those of you wondering, she lived.
While many of you are not facing life or death exacerbations of cardiac or pulmonary diseases, all of you can sympathize with the effects of panic and anxiety. Daily breath practices train the mind and the body on how to respond to a crisis, and who knows, one day it might save your life.
