The Psycho-Spiritual Meaning Behind Asthma

There is nothing more humbling and awakening than feeling like you can't breathe. Last year, I developed asthma for the first time in my life. Wheezing, uncontrollable coughing, hyperventilating, and sleep deprivation eroded my sense of well-being for months. I struggled to cope with the daily experience of my breathing that can only be described as breathing through a straw stuffed with cotton. The perceived lack of control and the palpable sense of panic and suffocation would often remind me of my early 20s when I experienced sleep paralysis frequently, unable to move or speak upon awakening from intense and violent dreams.

While immune-enhancing lifestyle support and diet changes were a necessary part of my healing, perhaps the most significant teachings that asthma revealed to me were the unconscious ways that my past traumas influence how I show up in the world. Specifically, how unhealthy ways of coping and making meaning of my challenges create tension and stress to the point of inflammation.

Through complex feedback loops, mind and body influence one another in profound ways. The body reflects the mental life. Consider the book Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers by Stanford University biologist Robert M. Sapolsky, who explores the profound impact that stress has on chronic illness and disease. When studying and understanding body tensions, we learn that our behavior, body structure, and physiology are all influenced by deeply held beliefs and significant early memories. Feedback from chronic bodily mobilizations and tensions confirm and reinforce belief systems.

I grew up in a eggshell culture environment where my body's alarm was always on. My emotionally unstable mother lied all the time, insulted me daily, and and used me to manipulate those around her. I had a highly critical father who was deeply abusive and oppressive in every sense of those two words. I never knew what was going to happen at any given time in my home.

As a result, I learned to be extremely sensitive and attuned to the energies around me in order to avoid being hurt or punished. I learned that I was responsible for how other people feel, and spent much of my childhood trying to please and make my parents feel better. Being loved and accepted meant that I have to be perfect, cause no problems and shut off my needs. As an educator and activist, this resulted in taking on way too much than what I could handle. I tirelessly gave myself away to causes and people. I constantly worried that I was never doing enough, giving enough, achieving enough. The more I matured, I realized that it was less about giving up my caring ways as much as developing energetic boundaries and being in right relationship with those qualities.

Something that's taken me a while to trust is letting myself cry, be vulnerable, and ask for help or own what I want. I often identify with being the strong and capable one for others. More specifically, the happy one that doesn't rain on anyone's parade or rock the boat. Upholding this effort feels suffocating at times. I've come to see these past traumas and subsequent learned beliefs as the roots of my asthma.

“There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.” — Thomas Merton in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

A Holistic Approach to Asthma

Holistic approaches to health operate on the principle that relationships, interactions, and functions within our body are more important than seeing parts of our body as isolated units working independently from each other. This perspective seeks to establish and enhance communication between self and environment, mind and body, conscious and unconscious.

In certain forms of therapy like Internal Family Systems and Gestalt therapy, you talk to a projection of some part of yourself, a part you don't want to own, a part you have pushed away. You also come into contact with the compassionate, observational, and mature parts of you. In this dialogue, these parts start to communicate in order to resolve their differences and be in right relationship in the system. The process of communication organizes parts into wholes, and creates connection where there was separation. As addiction and trauma expert Dr. Gabor Mate says, illness often stems from disconnection from the whole self. This is often a result of traumatic events and oppressive cultural norms where it's too painful to stay connected, so disconnection becomes a defense.

Somatic psychotherapist Ron Kurtz suggests that "we embrace unity when we bring attention to aspects of ourselves and others that are in isolation and conflict." Health and healing is a natural result of the attention each part gives to the others, and the capacity for living systems to make new, creative connections in order to evolve towards greater harmony and wholeness.

From the traditional Chinese medicine perspective, emotions are believed to directly correlate to specific organs and their states of being, in which much of disease can manifest from an imbalance in our emotions. The lungs are the organ connected to the emotion of grief. The lungs interact with the outside world. When we inhale, we take in oxygen which energizes our cells and the whole body. When we exhale, carbon dioxide and other waste products gets released from our body. On a deeper level, the inhale represents receiving, letting in. The exhale represents release, and letting go of what's unnecessary. The lungs are connected energetically with the large intestine, which helps us detoxify and shed whatever it is we don’t need in our bodies.

On a psycho-spiritual level, the emotional blockage of not receiving what is needed or not letting go of what's unnecessary affects the physical receiving and letting go action of the lungs. When I have an intense asthma attack, being willing to surrender to what I can't control and accept my limitations play a huge part in how quickly my airways reduce in swelling. This also includes slowing things down to the pace of deep, diaphragmatic breathing.

What I'm currently working through is letting myself be loved and cared for by my significant other. I've always been able to express my love in fruitful ways, yet receiving love back is another story. The shame I feel about asking for what I want is intense. It reminds me of a courageous conversation I had with my mother a few years ago, where she confessed to spending every day hating my existence and wishing she would miscarry when she was pregnant with me. Hearing this was a relief. This indicated that I took on a sense of shame and abandonment that was not mine to carry. I have to remind myself of this when I am confronted with my frequent struggle to feel worthy of literally existing and having needs.

I've also been spending way too much energy focusing on my deficiencies and insecurities, along with giving 100% to everything and everyone around me. My tendency is to also speed up and get caught up in "doing," which effectively discourages relaxation and taking time to slow things down. I believe that all of this has contributed to my most recent bout of asthma this past week.

Psycho-Spiritual Axis of Healing

Many alternative health practitioners perceive asthma to be a sign of spiritual and emotional imbalance. I see this reflected in my current health situation, considering all that I'm processing and healing in my life.

Psychologist Dave Richo explores the healing potential in attending to both psychological and spiritual work in our lives. Psychological work is a linear chronology leading us from problem to solution, from dysfunction to adequate level functioning. It is the function of the healthy ego to respond to threats and challenges, as we work towards goals and specific changes.

On the other hand, spiritual work is a journey to reclaim the centered and sovereign Self that lives in the here-and-now, and not in the conditioned past. Spiritual work has no goal like psychological work. Instead, it is a path that takes us back home to ourselves, where we lighten up and let go. There's a saying that most of us don't have a lot to change, we just have a lot to let go of. Our spiritual self understands that we are complete and whole, just as we are. As the founder of humanistic psychology Carl Rogers once said, “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”

In our lives, Richo says that we alternate between psychological work (gain through pain and effort) and spiritual work (gain through grace and effortless shifts). Both are important to optimal functioning, and operate separately and simultaneously as life unfolds. A healthy ego, which he describes as the center of our conscious life, doesn't hold on to any transitory reality as permanently reliable. Just like the breath, our ego enjoys a continual play of giving and receiving, working on what yields to change and accepting what does not yield.

Given a recent asthma flare-up, I made a list of what I commit to doing in a psychological and spiritual sense.

Psychological/physical intentions:

1. Practicing my "no" muscle when it comes to setting energetic boundaries with people. By saying no, I say yes to self-care, forming my own opinions, prioritizing what's most important, and maintaining my energy.
2. Asking for what I want, and working through the discomfort and past voices that come up in doing so.
3. Distrusting and questioning voices of insecurity and doubt in myself, and asking for feedback to get a more honest picture of reality.
4. Receiving acupuncture support.
5. Daily intake of Chinese herbs, Quercetin, Turmeric, Black Pepper, CBD/THCA, vitamins A, C, and D.
6. Cutting out dairy and doing a sugar fast.
7. Getting in the habit of diaphragmatic breathing throughout the day.

Spiritual intentions:

1. Slow things down. Pause.
2. Savoring positive moments (instead of moving on to the next thing or pushing it away).
3. Spending quality time alone and in nature.
4. Continue cultivating an openness and trust in myself in the face of the unknowable.

Today, I danced for the first time in a while. I feel so grateful to have my full breath back. In fact, the last clip is me shuffling for the whole duration of the song without stopping to catch my breath. Woohoo!!

If you got down this far, I so appreciate you taking the time to read my post!

Here's to healing.