Priscilla Warner - Learning to Breathe: My Yearlong Quest to Bring Calm to My Life

Praise for Learning to Breathe

Warner deftly describes her various treatments. She delves into painful family memories and recounts her panic attacks in detail. For those readers who have experienced this debilitating condition, or who have family members who have... insightful.

Wise, searching, fearless, and bighearted, Priscilla Warners search for inner peace will resonate with anyone who has ever been anxious or at seain other words, all of us. She is a comforting and stabilizing guide through her own lifeand ours. This book is a gift.

The words leap off the page. Priscilla Warners courageous story from panic to peace brims with insights that light the path to simply living a better life.

A fascinating tale of courage, perseverance, and resolve. In lucid and entertaining prosewith several laugh-out-loud momentsWarner is a travel guide for the anxious and the wounded, leading us from a life of fear and burden to a perspective of freedom and wonder. Her story is a gift to anyone determined to find peace.

The Faith Club
by Ranya Idliby, Suzanne Oliver, and Priscilla Warner

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Copyright 2011 by Priscilla Warner

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Free Press Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

First Free Press hardcover edition September 2011

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Manufactured in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Warner, Priscilla.
Learning to breathe: my yearlong quest to bring calm to my life/
Priscilla Warner.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Warner, PriscillaHealth. 2. Panic attacksAlternative treatment.
3. Anxiety disordersTreatment. 4. Meditation. I. Title.
RC535.W37 2011

616.85'223dc22 2011008429

ISBN 978-1-4391-8107-2
ISBN 978-1-4391-8109-6 (ebook)

This book is an account of experiences I shared with many wonderful people. Its based on my recollections, as well as tape recordings I made of conversations and therapy sessions and careful notes I took during teaching sessions. In a few instances, the names and/or identifying characteristics of some people have been changed.

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Jimmy

Max and Jack

Riva and Paul

Shantideva, A Guide to the Bodhisattvas Way of Life

Contents

How to Live

Takeoff

Slumped in my airplane seat, I could barely see enough of Tulsa, Oklahoma, to say goodbye to it in the early morning darkness. The plane took off and I was headed home to New York on the last leg of an intense three-year lecture tour. I opened a magazine... and there were the monksyet again.

Dressed in crimson robes, their heads shaved, serene Tibetan men stared out at me from a photograph. These same men had been inadvertently haunting me for years, because they had found an inner peace that had eluded me for so long. While Id been experiencing debilitating panic attacks and anxiety for decades, they had been meditating so effectively that their prefrontal brain lobes lit up on MRI scans, plumped up like perfectly ripe peaches.

Thats not precisely the way the monks brains were described in the medical studies Id read about, but thats how I imagined themhappily pregnant with positive energy. Unlike my brain, which felt battered and bruised, swollen with anxiety, adrenaline, heartache, and hormones.

I want the brain of a monk! I decided right then and there.

I also wanted everything that went along with that brainpeace and tranquility, compassion and kindness, wisdom and patience. Was that too much to ask for?

And so my mission was born.

I became determined to get my prefrontal lobe to light up like the monks lobes, to develop a brain that would run quietly and smoothly, instead of bouncing around in my skull like a Mexican jumping bean. Some people set up meth labs in their basements, but I wanted a Klonopin lab in my head, producing a natural version of the drug my therapist had prescribed for me several years earlier, to help me cope with chronic anxiety and panic.

I had already been searching for serenity on and off for forty years, during which Id traveled to Turkey and toured the ancient caves of early Christian mystics, read Rumis exquisite Sufi poetry, and learned about the mysteries of Kabbalah. I regularly drank herbal tea and lit incense in my bedroom. And Id gotten my meridians massaged while my chakras were tended to by soft-spoken attendants at occasional spa splurges.

I would have loved to travel to Nepal to find inner peace, sitting at the feet of a monk on a mountaintop, but I panic at high altitudes. I didnt want to move to a monastery, but I figured there were dozens of things I could do in my own backyard that could make me positively monk-like. So I decided to try behaving like a monk while still shopping for dinner at my local suburban strip mall. And I decided to chronicle my adventures.

This full-scale brain renovation would take some time, planning, improvisation, and hard work. Still, I hoped, if I exercised my tired gray cells properly, on a sustained, regular basis, and fed my brain all sorts of good things like meditation, guided imagery, yoga, macrobiotic stuff, and Buddhist teachings, maybe it would change physically. Id heard neuroplasticity thrown around in scientific reports, a term that means that the brain is supposedly able to transform itself at any age. Perhaps mine would be like Silly Puttybendable and pliable and lots of fun to work with.

What did I have to lose? I shifted in my airplane seat, the monks still gazing up at me from the photograph.