Malfunctioning yoga breath

Tossing and turning, sheets twisted and pulled, as soon as my alarm clock rung my heart was filled with dread. I stepped out of bed and headed straight to the kitchen to make my morning cup of coffee. I needed it, last nights sleep was not exactly restful.

I showered and brushed my teeth with extra care, making sure my breath would smell of as much artificial mint as possible. Lacing up my shoes I tried to calm my breathing "Think yoga Annika, deep breaths, deeeep breaaathss".

Today I was going to go to the dentist.

I never used to be scared of the dentist. But last night when I had remembered the appointment to fix a chipped tooth the fear had overwhelmed me! The 20 minute walk to the dentist was torture, my damn yoga breathing was broken or malfunctioning and definitely not helping! I tried to convince my brain that "I can either make this a difficult experience or an easy one, its up to you Annika", that helped, for about a minute. I dared to enter the dentists office, mainly since I needed to sit down.

"Just to let you know, I am really nervous" I said to the nurse. He nodded his head and went on checking my blood pressure, "Wow, you are not kidding about being nervous ma'am" He said writing down my sky high levels. I was secretly hoping he would tell me my blood pressure was too high to possibly fix anything today. He didn't.

The first 20 minutes I was overcome by fear, breathing was all I was trying to focus on, I even tried counting sheep to distract myself from the highly uncomfortable situation I was in. The last 20 my arm went numb so I worried I was having a stroke or something caused by all this stress (later the dentist explained that was because my head was situated lower then my body in the chair. Well, he could have warned me!).

When I was finally done I took my cooked spaghetti legs and almost run (or stumbled) out of that office. As soon as I was outside all the worry flew of me or melted away or whatever, and I felt like me again, finally! I sat down on the iron bench outside, let out a deep sigh and thought 'was that IT?' That was nothing! And I started to laugh.

All that worry, fear and wasted energy had just held me captive. There was no reason at all for me to have felt that way, but I let myself get sucked into it! And when it was over I felt so silly. This is not the first time it happened. I have also become scared of flying recently. Yeah, I still do it but I suffer the whole time. Why do we do this? Why now when I haven't been affected by those situations before? You tell me because I have no idea.

But today I learned, AGAIN, that change is the only constant we have, the only thing we really know will happen for certain. Nothing last forever, everything passes even fear and horror. I will try to remember this in the future when struck by sudden horror, it is just hard when the darn yoga breathing wont work!