Thirty years ago I rode to Ballston Spa to meet with the woman who would become my oboe teacher. For our first lesson, I barely got to play a note. Before I even took out my instrument, she made me lie down on my back. The key to playing the oboe, she explained, was learning how to breathe. I thought I knew what she meant, but I didn’t, and even when I approached understanding, it was just going through the motions. At the time, it was a difficult lesson that didn’t open itself up right away.
She told me to lie back on the couch and relax.
In case it isn’t obvious, the moment someone tells me to relax, I tend to do the opposite, resulting in all sorts of additional tension. Shoulders bunched up, shallow breaths into my upper chest, and the wish that she would just tell me how she wanted me to relax made for an uncomfortable set of circumstances. I lied there for a while doing my best imitation of a relaxed person while she waited and watched. My mind scrambled to find the way out of this, the magic thing she was looking for me to elicit. Should I yawn? Should I feign sleep? Should I fart? What did this lady want from me?
She pushed my shoulders down. “You’re not relaxed yet,” she told me. No shit. You are telling me to relax and I just met you ten minutes ago. I’m lying on my back on your couch and you’re hovering over me, watching every intake of breath. How in the hell was I supposed to relax? It was at least the fifth circle of social anxiety hell, and every which way I looked was just another circle of it.
I stayed there and she instructed me to close my eyes, because whatever a relaxed person was supposed to do was clearly not in my lexicon. I’d always impressed every teacher I had and within the first few minutes of this oboe lesson I was letting her down. If I couldn’t do something as simple as relax, how in the hell could I play an oboe concerto? Well, I didn’t quite make that connection at the time – I only knew that I was failing and flailing at the whole relaxation exercise, and that made me even less relaxed.
We stayed that way for about ten more minutes, at which point she indicated I still wasn’t relaxed. Detecting a note of amusement in her voice, and guessing that it usually didn’t take this long for other students to relax, I implored her with a little laugh of desperation. Patiently, she waited for whatever sign she was seeking that would indicate my desired state of relaxation, but it never came.
I couldn’t do it.
I couldn’t relax.
Not under command.
And all I wanted was for her to tell me what to do so I could pretend to actually do it.
Was all my tension and unease written on my face? I tried relaxing the muscles of my forehead and jaw, I tried letting a soft smile spread to the corners of my mouth, and I tried to slow the erratic blinking of my eyes.
This was an excruciating exercise for a kid like me. I don’t know how long we waited, but I knew it usually didn’t take this long. Already, and forever after, I would be slightly different from everyone else. My mind began to wander because I was at an impasse, and whenever I find myself with nowhere to turn, I let my unconscious mind work its own way out of the predicament. In this instance it was just enough, and my breathing went just the slightest bit into my stomach, at which point my teacher perked up and said I was finally relaxing. She put her hand on my belly and asked me if I felt the breath going in.
Oh my sweet Lord in heaven, that’s what she wanted? Why didn’t she just say so from the damn beginning? I can breathe into my stomach and look like the most relaxed person on earth! She wanted something genuine and real, but I was in no way ready for that. In fact, I wouldn’t be ready for decades. But I could feign a physical state of relaxation simply by slowing my breathing and letting it fill my stomach. I knew it was pretend, but it was a start. And it got me up off the damn couch.
I would not be able to truly relax for many years. From my outward appearance, most people couldn’t tell. It wasn’t that I was a high-strung person – I didn’t usually act jittery or tense or nervous (unless I happened upon excessive caffeine or sugar), and I didn’t have the typical persona of someone who didn’t know how to let go. In fact, the majority of people who encountered me assumed I was more relaxed than most, living a charmed, easy life with nary a care or concern. Unfortunately for my health and well-being, I kept it all bottled inside. My tension, my anxiety, my crippling doubts – they all held up within my heart, hiding there and wreaking havoc in other ways.
For a long time I thought it could be solved in another person – the perfectly supportive set of parents, the loyal and trustworthy set of friends, the caring and tender romantic partner – and those things helped in their own way, but they also hindered finding it on my own. Only recently have I begun to see that it doesn’t involve a husband, a family, or a support network of friends, it doesn’t involve a job, a career, or a creative outlet, it doesn’t require fancy clothes, expensive cologne, or material accumulations. It was within me, just waiting to be unlocked, waiting for me to figure out the way to access the calm serenity that is possible when you look within and face whatever truths you’ve kept inside. That may mean accepting the unease when someone commands you to relax. That may mean acknowledging the discomfort that comes with worry and fear. That may mean lying on a couch and realizing that you can’t always be perfect for everyone, and that it’s ok not to be. Because if you’re ok with yourself, you don’t need all those other things.
Today, I breathe into my stomach when things are falling apart around me, and it helps. It doesn’t solve everything, but it changes the dynamics of perception. Most of the time that’s enough. I breathe in slowly, then breath out slowly. Repeating this a few more times, I shift my focus from the bad things at hand to the singular effort and action of the breath.
