I had long known about belly breathing, or more accurately, diaphragmatic breathing. In my lifelong effort to understand myself, I was always reading and searching for new insights, and occasionally I would come across breathing techniques.
I tried them from time to time, but the whole concept seemed strangely foreign. Allowing my stomach to relax and move as I breathed simply didn't make sense to me. I could deliberately make myself do it, but it never felt natural.
Previously, I had seen a rigid stomach as strength. Now I see it as something else: a body that had forgotten how to let go.
For most of my life, I carried an almost constant tension in my body. I was braced without knowing I was braced. What I now recognize as chronic stress and hypervigilance had simply felt normal because I had never known anything else.
I was about two years into my sabbatical when something changed.
I'm not quite sure how to describe it. The tension in my body just seemed to release. There wasn't a decision to relax or a technique I was practicing. Something simply let go.
The feeling was foreign enough that I noticed it immediately.
And somehow I knew it was significant.
It felt like healing.
Somewhere around that same period, my breathing changed. I don't remember exactly when it happened, and I wasn't consciously trying to change it. I simply began to notice that my stomach naturally rose and fell when I breathed.
The thing I had once needed instructions to do had become automatic.
Diaphragmatic breathing is associated with the parasympathetic nervous system, sometimes described as the body's "rest and digest" state. Whether or not I understood the physiology at the time, I understood what the change meant to me.
My body no longer seemed to believe it had to be prepared for something all the time.
I had spent years trying to understand myself intellectually. I read, analyzed, questioned, reconsidered my past, and slowly learned to trust my own perceptions.
But this was different.
My body was telling me something.
I don't remember the exact timeline of when my breathing changed, but I knew it reflected the progress I was making. For perhaps the first time in my life, relaxation was becoming something I didn't have to consciously perform.
I was learning how to breathe.
Or perhaps, after a lifetime of holding myself tight against the world, I was finally learning that I could let go.
About the Author
The author is a late-recognized AuDHD writer, retired technology operations leader, systems thinker, father and grandfather living on the California coast. After decades spent solving technical and organizational problems for others, he now writes about systems that are harder to see: masking, self-trust, family memory, and the ways people are shaped by the explanations others construct about them. His work combines personal narrative with analytical inquiry, trying to distinguish what is known from what is inferred without pretending that uncertainty makes lived experience unreal.
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