The key advice I give to anyone suffering from acute Covid - admitted in the hospital, or having breathing trouble otherwise - is to calm down and breathe slowly. If you calm your mind, and focus your mind on your breathing, your heart rate will drop.
As explained by my pulmonologist, this is a simple physiological response. When your lungs don't get enough oxygen, they breathe faster. When your heart senses that your blood isn't carrying enough oxygen per litre, it beats faster. It is pumping more blood through your body, so that your cells receive the oxygen per minute that they need. You don't control this with your mind - your lungs and heart are spontaneously responding to variations in your blood oxygen level.
Late one evening, at home, my pulse rate shot up above 130, and I panicked. Panic is not what you need when your heart rate is high. After some confusion, I decided that I am not visiting the ER at night. This decision taken, it was up to me to take care of my body that night, not doctors or nurses. So I lay down in bed, and I started breathing really slowly. I put on some instrumental guitar music - of the genre that could be called spa music - and then I started observing my breath. (Jaya, you know about this evening).
I could not observe my breathing rate at home. But my SpO2 floated up to 94. My pulse rate fell down to 110. At this point I went to sleep. The next night, I repeated the trick. Only this time, the SpO2 went up to 95, and the pulse fell to 90, pretty close to the upper bound of 80 that doctor's recommend. For a man with dicey lungs, a pulse rate of 90 ain't bad.
All my life, people have been trying to teach me meditation. Focus your mind. Empty your mind. But I don't understand why. What is the need? My mind isn't full of trash. It is brimming with wonderful things. Questions about society. New product and startup ideas. Travel plans. Craft ideas. Bad jokes to torture my children with. Happy memories that I recycle all the time. Sometimes my mind gets stuck on some bad memory, but it is easy enough to reach out to a friend or therapist and clear that up.
But I need to calm my mind now. You see, I can directly see the impact of a calm mind on my lungs and heart. And I need to heal my lungs. Which is why I am not doing any work yet. There is no work without stress, deadlines, painful decisions, and surprises that unsettle you. At least that is how my line of work is.
I have had to let it all go - anxiety, worries, to do lists. Even in personal life, being completely calm is easier than one would imagine, once there is a medical need for calmness. It's just like when I am coding or studying. I focus my entire concentration on my code, and then I end up filtering out most sounds and other disturbances from my environment. Now I focus on staying calm.
Yesterday I dropped my phone and broke the screen. Typically, this would cause me a fair amount of remorse. After a bad economy, months of lost work, and mounting medical expenses, the last thing I need is the unnecessary expense of a screen replacement. The repair guys refused to replace it under warranty due to physical damage, so I paid out of pocket and got it done. Que sera sera is not a good philosophy to live by, but it can be a conscious choice I make to save my baniya mind a ton of unnecessary distress.
The class of mind-body exercises - yoga, tai chi, meditation - are clinically proven to reduce blood pressure and assist with heart conditions. In the case of yoga, Patanjali wrote that it is not enough to practice Kriya Yoga. One must first transform one's entire life. You cannot continue to live the way you were living and become a yogi - lifestyle has to change first. The emphasis is on first. And of course, it goes without saying that yoga should only be taught and practiced in the presence of a well qualified teacher.
It's not like I haven't learnt yoga in the past. But it was all water off a duck's back. So you can say I am a novice. Even a novice can bring about a change in lifestyle, and practice breath meditation, in order to eliminate anxiety/stress and the physiological changes it brings.
Which is why it is surprising how large and powerful an industry has cropped up around the simple task of teaching people pranayam. One hairy fellow is teaching kapalbhati and bhastrika over the telly. Over the telly! People are sitting alone up in their bedrooms at 5am practising this stuff. Thankfully Patanjali wasn't buried, otherwise he would be spinning in his grave at the sight of beginners doing yoga and pranayam without any oversight whatsoever.
Next comes the fellow who goes to Mahesh Yogi, learns Kriya Yoga, then decides that this whole free and open source approach that yoga has, simply won't do. So he concocts his own Kriyas, stuff that is more intense than anything in the Yoga Sutras. Stuff that is borderline hyperventilation. All of this gets packaged into nice commercial bundles, marketed in the most savvy manner to people with too much money and too little time.
And then comes Jaggi, a yogi who nobody has ever seen doing any serious yoga himself. He is so busy violating some law or the other, he just doesn't have time for this mundane stuff.
These are just three examples of new age yogis who have violated the very first rule of being a yogi - that of renunciation. Living a jet set lifestyle and building an empire is simply not how a yogi is supposed to conduct himself, so they decided to also be spiritual teachers. Now they regularly abuse words such as quantum, vibration and transcendent, even when none of them has ever been near a Physics book in their life.
They are not the first yogi-spiritual teachers to have dabbled with physics. Annie Besant tried to use clairvoyance to observe the structures of atoms. Aurobindo's followers spiritedly claim that he levitated while meditating in his jail cell. Both Besant and Aurobindo built sprawling campuses in Chennai and Pondicherry. But you visit those campuses even today, and you witness what one calls yogic living - a simple lifestyle.
Anyway. This whole criticism bit is a huge digression. My point is, go local. The size and stature of a yoga guru isn't going to help you. The presence does. Find a teacher who has passed a rigorous teacher's training course in yoga. And if you can't do that in these restricted times, just listen to your own body and do your own thing. A simple oxymeter or wearable fitness band will let you monitor your heart rate and oxygen saturation, thus letting you see the impact of your meditation in real time.
As explained by my pulmonologist, this is a simple physiological response. When your lungs don't get enough oxygen, they breathe faster. When your heart senses that your blood isn't carrying enough oxygen per litre, it beats faster. It is pumping more blood through your body, so that your cells receive the oxygen per minute that they need. You don't control this with your mind - your lungs and heart are spontaneously responding to variations in your blood oxygen level.
Late one evening, at home, my pulse rate shot up above 130, and I panicked. Panic is not what you need when your heart rate is high. After some confusion, I decided that I am not visiting the ER at night. This decision taken, it was up to me to take care of my body that night, not doctors or nurses. So I lay down in bed, and I started breathing really slowly. I put on some instrumental guitar music - of the genre that could be called spa music - and then I started observing my breath. (Jaya, you know about this evening).
I could not observe my breathing rate at home. But my SpO2 floated up to 94. My pulse rate fell down to 110. At this point I went to sleep. The next night, I repeated the trick. Only this time, the SpO2 went up to 95, and the pulse fell to 90, pretty close to the upper bound of 80 that doctor's recommend. For a man with dicey lungs, a pulse rate of 90 ain't bad.
All my life, people have been trying to teach me meditation. Focus your mind. Empty your mind. But I don't understand why. What is the need? My mind isn't full of trash. It is brimming with wonderful things. Questions about society. New product and startup ideas. Travel plans. Craft ideas. Bad jokes to torture my children with. Happy memories that I recycle all the time. Sometimes my mind gets stuck on some bad memory, but it is easy enough to reach out to a friend or therapist and clear that up.
But I need to calm my mind now. You see, I can directly see the impact of a calm mind on my lungs and heart. And I need to heal my lungs. Which is why I am not doing any work yet. There is no work without stress, deadlines, painful decisions, and surprises that unsettle you. At least that is how my line of work is.
I have had to let it all go - anxiety, worries, to do lists. Even in personal life, being completely calm is easier than one would imagine, once there is a medical need for calmness. It's just like when I am coding or studying. I focus my entire concentration on my code, and then I end up filtering out most sounds and other disturbances from my environment. Now I focus on staying calm.
Yesterday I dropped my phone and broke the screen. Typically, this would cause me a fair amount of remorse. After a bad economy, months of lost work, and mounting medical expenses, the last thing I need is the unnecessary expense of a screen replacement. The repair guys refused to replace it under warranty due to physical damage, so I paid out of pocket and got it done. Que sera sera is not a good philosophy to live by, but it can be a conscious choice I make to save my baniya mind a ton of unnecessary distress.
The class of mind-body exercises - yoga, tai chi, meditation - are clinically proven to reduce blood pressure and assist with heart conditions. In the case of yoga, Patanjali wrote that it is not enough to practice Kriya Yoga. One must first transform one's entire life. You cannot continue to live the way you were living and become a yogi - lifestyle has to change first. The emphasis is on first. And of course, it goes without saying that yoga should only be taught and practiced in the presence of a well qualified teacher.
It's not like I haven't learnt yoga in the past. But it was all water off a duck's back. So you can say I am a novice. Even a novice can bring about a change in lifestyle, and practice breath meditation, in order to eliminate anxiety/stress and the physiological changes it brings.
Which is why it is surprising how large and powerful an industry has cropped up around the simple task of teaching people pranayam. One hairy fellow is teaching kapalbhati and bhastrika over the telly. Over the telly! People are sitting alone up in their bedrooms at 5am practising this stuff. Thankfully Patanjali wasn't buried, otherwise he would be spinning in his grave at the sight of beginners doing yoga and pranayam without any oversight whatsoever.
Next comes the fellow who goes to Mahesh Yogi, learns Kriya Yoga, then decides that this whole free and open source approach that yoga has, simply won't do. So he concocts his own Kriyas, stuff that is more intense than anything in the Yoga Sutras. Stuff that is borderline hyperventilation. All of this gets packaged into nice commercial bundles, marketed in the most savvy manner to people with too much money and too little time.
And then comes Jaggi, a yogi who nobody has ever seen doing any serious yoga himself. He is so busy violating some law or the other, he just doesn't have time for this mundane stuff.
These are just three examples of new age yogis who have violated the very first rule of being a yogi - that of renunciation. Living a jet set lifestyle and building an empire is simply not how a yogi is supposed to conduct himself, so they decided to also be spiritual teachers. Now they regularly abuse words such as quantum, vibration and transcendent, even when none of them has ever been near a Physics book in their life.
They are not the first yogi-spiritual teachers to have dabbled with physics. Annie Besant tried to use clairvoyance to observe the structures of atoms. Aurobindo's followers spiritedly claim that he levitated while meditating in his jail cell. Both Besant and Aurobindo built sprawling campuses in Chennai and Pondicherry. But you visit those campuses even today, and you witness what one calls yogic living - a simple lifestyle.
Anyway. This whole criticism bit is a huge digression. My point is, go local. The size and stature of a yoga guru isn't going to help you. The presence does. Find a teacher who has passed a rigorous teacher's training course in yoga. And if you can't do that in these restricted times, just listen to your own body and do your own thing. A simple oxymeter or wearable fitness band will let you monitor your heart rate and oxygen saturation, thus letting you see the impact of your meditation in real time.