Breathless in Bali

On circular breathing, temporary paralysis, and an apology long overdue

And just start to bring yourself back into the room.

Wait, who’s talking?

See if you can get some movement in your fingers and toes.

Huh? Where am I?

When you’re ready, slowly take the mask off your eyes.

The what? Oh god, have I been kidnapped? No, that doesn’t feel right. Shit, am I in hospital? Was I in surgery? Wait. Where are my kidneys? What’s happened?

My brain starts to piece together the last 90 minutes like it’s doing one of those pictureless jigsaw puzzles while drunk. I’m lying on the floor of a wellness studio in Indonesia, my lower back prickling with sweat and my arms and legs stubbornly refusing to move.

Uma Thurman is yelling at me to wiggle my big toe. Oh fuck off, Uma.

If you can’t move your arms and legs just yet, then see if you can roll onto your side.

I perform the sort of furrump that chubby seals do across sand, and find myself on my side, unable to do anything about the tears that have slithered their way down the side of my nose and into the base of my nostril. Failing to sniff them away, I watch them drip onto the yoga mat.

It’s not snot.

Pardon, sweetheart?

It’s not snot.

My top lip isn’t working either.

Well, this is pathetic. A lifetime of little miss, I’m too highly strung to meditate, yoga is boring, and ice baths are a bro code midlife crisis, and just fucking breathing for 90 minutes has left me making as much sense as a Teletubby. I’m probably bloody Laa-laa, too. Everyone knows that was the worst one.

Are you ok?

Yeah. (no). It’s just that was a little intense. (fucking bonkers). It wasn’t what I was expecting. (am I dead?).

Breathwork, it transpires, is most definitely not for the faint-hearted.

I’d arrived at the studio the way I arrive at most things I’m pretending I don’t really believe in: underprepared and performatively unbothered. Circular breathing, less CO2, yes yes I know.

Is there anything I should know about before we start?

The instructor is exactly how I imagined she’d look. Like Blake Lively in the film with the shark, but wearing floaty trousers with little elephants all over them. Focus Lucy, do not get a crush on the breathwork instructor.

Know about? Like what?

Every childhood trauma, bad decision and cringeworthy romantic rendezvous sprint to the back of my teeth, jostling for position. How bad is this going to be? What’s going to happen?

Like, do you have any heart problems? Or other active health conditions I should know about?

That time I snogged a soldier called Simon in an alleyway in Cardiff slopes off, disappointed. My childhood guinea pig looks on. Sorry Clive. May your memory be a blessing.

Any history of psychosis?

Oh, no, nothing like that. (WTF?)

A little rattled, I listened as she explained what was going to happen, and I nodded along, filing everything under interesting but probably won’t apply to me, I’m a bit too cerebral for this sort of thing. I’ve always maintained that I wouldn’t be able to be hypnotised, and this felt like that in the same font.

Great, we’ll get started then. Lie down and pop your mask over your eyes and just follow what I say. I’m going to turn the music up for us.

The breathing itself starts almost comically. I’m transported back to year 8 drama class where, in what I now realise was a fully unprepared lesson, the teacher would just allow us to lie on the floor and giggle through breathing exercises for an hour a week. In through the nose, chest, belly, out through the mouth. Over and over, until it starts to feel mechanical, and then faster, so it feels absurd, and then faster again until you stop thinking about how absurd it is because something else is happening.

Something else entirely.

It began in my hands. A tingling that wasn’t unpleasant, like the feeling just before a limb wakes up. Then my face. My top lip numbing and spasming. Legs, buttocks, shoulder blades, neck. Waves and waves of tingling, pulsing, vibrating. I can’t hear anything coherently. I know my eyes are closed, and I have a mask over them, but I am seeing things.

Oh great, now I’ve gone mad. Brilliant. Well done, Lucy.

What happened next is difficult to describe without sounding like the worst person at a dinner party.

So I’ll just say this: something cracked open.

Not gently either. It cracked like a stick of rock in an impatient child’s mouth.

I heard, as in I swear I actually heard, the words “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry” scratching on a loop.

Who is sorry? Am I sorry?

I was in my body completely and out of my body completely. Free from the endless whirring of my brain and running, directionless, through my mind. Time disappeared. I disappeared.

Yeaaaahhh… definitely don’t sit next to me at the next event I’m invited to.

And then, like a tide going slack before it turns, everything went still.

Not quiet. Still. The difference between the absence of noise and the absence of urgency. For the first time in longer than I can accurately account for, I didn’t feel the electric sensation of needing to rush to the next thing on a list where I keep inventing things to do. I was just a woman lying on a mat, and that was, astonishingly, enough.

The sorry kept scratching on. And somewhere in the scratching I understood, in the body, in the chest, the way you know things you’ve never been told - that it wasn’t aimed at anyone else. It was me. Apologising to me. For all of it. For every year I’d treated my own exhaustion as an inconvenience to be scheduled around. For every time I’d called my own needs high maintenance. For the relentless, grinding project of making myself easier to carry.

For Clive, probably. Sorry Clive. Sorry about everything.

And I was so angry, and so sad, and so completely undone, and also, bafflingly, fine. The two states coexisted without apology. Both true. Both allowed.

Finally able to make my limbs move, and gather myself into an upright position, my face performs its own embarrassing sort of mutiny and crumples into a sob.

I cried.

I cried in a way I have not cried since before I understood that crying was something you did in private, or not at all.

Why am I crying?

Because it has to come out.

200 years pass, and eventually she asks.

How are you feeling?

Like I put something down.

I answer, thickly.

She nods. She knows.

I don’t know what I was expecting. A vision. A revelation. A detailed instruction manual for the rest of my life, ideally laminated.

What I got was temporary paralysis, a ghostly apology from me to me, and the realisation that I had been carrying something very heavy for a very long time.

And that I was (whisper it) allowed to set it down.

Not yet. First, I was going to eat something with an unreasonable caloric density and absolutely not think about any of this.

That’s not how this works, you know?

(because of course I am fully talking to myself now like a proper weirdo.)

Yeah, I know.

I know.

Condensation beads instantly on my air-conditioned skin as I Bambi my way back out into the shimmering heat. An orchestra of construction, moped horns and multi-accented tourists knock on my eardrums.

A voice cuts through the chaos. A man with a dog-eared sign is gesturing at me.

Excuse me, Miss, you look stressed. Want a massage?

I see his bewildered face as I laugh until I’m around the corner, and then I buy an ice cream.