No Time to Panic by Matt Gutman

Author:Matt Gutman [Gutman, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2023-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

Skip Notes

* We no longer use satellite trucks beaming information to orbiting satellites. More commonly, TV news uses transmitters that aggregate signal from multiple cell phone SIM cards to send video.

CHAPTER 7

Lobster Claws and Mushrooms

This may sound like the start of a Bruce Springsteen ballad. It’s not quite. Back at my New Jersey high school, there was a football player named Lane Jaffe. Two grades above me, he was captain of both the football and lacrosse teams. An annoyingly effortless athlete, he won a scholarship to play lacrosse at Rutgers and starred all four years. In high school, Lane was one of the first to have facial hair, girlfriends, sex—things we underclassmen all desperately wanted. And in the days when hazing high school freshmen and sophomores was still tolerated, he had the distinction of being a nicer big man on campus than most.

Lane and I lost contact over the two decades since high school, but in the months before the pandemic began, he reached out, out of the blue. Turned out he was also living in LA. He was a yoga teacher now, with a devoted following, and he had started a promising breathwork practice. He’d battled what he called “depressive feelings” for years. Breathwork, peppered with psychedelics, had helped him find balance and wean off Wellbutrin. These days, even just a few years later, his pursuits are nearly ubiquitous in the wellness world, but when we started talking again in late 2019, he offered a message that felt both novel and persuasive.

As we eased back into friendship in the months that followed, Lane urged me to try breathwork. He’d spent about a year taking courses in LA and going on retreats in Costa Rica and Bali. He described the changes breathwork had had on his mind and even his physique. As a father with two kids whose incessant travel made him a homebody, I was initially reluctant. Plus, breathwork sounded too woo-woo for me, its promise of healing too far-fetched. So I put him off.

Suspension from your job does free up your schedule, though. So in early February 2020, I pulled up outside the Sanctum studio in Venice, California. From the outside, it looked like a hippie-chic junkyard (was that Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters’ bus parked in the lot?). One Yelp reviewer described the place as “a vortex of love and beauty.” Lane came out to greet me—bald head, light beard, intense dark eyes. He welcomed me with a bear hug and the familiar smell of home. He guided me into his studio, where ten or so people milled about waiting for class to begin. The room had vaguely arabesque decor and a large circular window, through which the February sun moseyed in. Lane handed me a yoga mat to lie on and a blanket to ward off the chill, adding that one can often feel cold during breathwork.

The technique he described seemed simple enough: two big breaths in through the mouth and one breath out of the mouth.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.