Is Mindfulness Really The Answer?

Or is mindfulness just the punctuation at the end of the question?

Photo by Fabian Møller on Unsplash

My wife recently told me something she thought was strange. ‘When you sleep you breathe backwards,’ she said.

‘What do you mean I breathe backwards?’ I asked.

‘Your chest doesn’t move and your belly expands. When I breathe my chest expands and my belly doesn’t move.’ She was telling me that, in my sleep, I was breathing from the diaphragm and not from the chest. From a certain perspective, yes, this is ‘backward,’ but the ‘direction’ depends on what the breathe is supposed to do. Most people, my wife included it seems, think that breathing through the chest is the ‘correct’ way of breathing.

When I first started practicing mindfulness, some five or so years ago, I deliberately began my daily practice with deep relaxing belly breathing. For the first few years, it brought quite a lot of peace into my life — for at least twenty minutes a day and a little more past that as it took the effects time to wear off. I slept better and, in the absence of a truly stressful event or crisis, my everyday level of anxiety lessened. Gradually, I brought both mindfulness and regular deep belly breathing into my daily life. Each of these techniques become a tactic I would bring, more and more, to moments of my day —…