Everyone tells us that the hardest part of the diagnosis is all the tests that you have to run before treatment.  Each test promises a restless night of sleep, a wondering if things are actually worse, questions about whether the next step is to administer chemo…or comfort.

Brutal.

There’s a phrase we tend to use for that waiting time between each test and the eventual results: it’s called holding your breath.

We’ve been holding our breath a lot lately.

And holding breath binds us up.  Holding breath builds up toxins in the system.  It is not enough to breathe in the life that is available to us.  We also have to blow out the toxins that build up incessantly in the meantime: fear, anxiety, chronic pain, that slow burning anger that just won’t go away, that sense that everything is teetering on the brink of catastrophe.

Can’t let that accumulate without other systems beginning to falter and fail.

The ancient Hebrews had a deep sense of this interconnectivity.  In their common life, there wasn’t a doctor for physical health and one for mental health.  There wasn’t a practitioner for spiritual health and another for financial health.  Everything was tied together.  Again, they saw themselves as dust and breath, spirit and soil.  Their language reflected this.

In the poems of Lamentations, we hear this grief expressed, “See, O Lord, for I am in distress; My spirit is greatly troubled, my heart is overturned within me…”

In expressing this emotional and psychological distress, the Hebrews used very bodily images.  The word for “spirit” here is the word me’eh, which is the Hebrew for the bowels, or intestines.  The word for “heart” here is the Hebrew kabed, which literally means “the liver”.  There was a recognition that what is happening in the spirit is being carried by the soil.

And so sometimes, more spirit work isn’t what is required in our grief.  What we need to pay attention to is our sinews and synapses, our liver and lungs.  Sometimes in our grief what is required is a soil work.

We’ve payed attention to what we’ve breathed in.  Now we have to pay attention to what we need to breathe out: worry and frustration and hatred and bitterness and stress and sorrow.

I find exercise a helpful way of getting at this.  I get in front of a set of weights, and I go for it.  I head to the lap pool, secure a lane, and go back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.  In the inhalation and exhalation, my body seems to be freeing things up that conversation and meditation and even relaxation just can’t get at.  Sometimes a good huff and puff is what is required.

Of course, not everyone can do this.  But there are other ways to work the soil, to free up the debris and toxicity that jams us up in times of grief.  Like singing: the most beautiful exhalation.  Or sobbing.  Sobbing’s a good one.  

Or Stephen Wright.

A friend of mine, finding herself in the midst of an incomprehensible loss and unfathomable grief, found a small slice of healing when a friend handed her a Brian Regan DVD.  She passed it on to us a few years back when we found ourselves in a similar space.  Doubled over in laughter was a good prescription.  

Sometimes, though, I need something stronger: like Jim Gaffigan.

When I was a kid, my father had this coffee-colored Oldsmobile ’88, what you might recognize as a land barge.  0 to 60 in an afternoon.  And it was a diesel. And I remember my dad saying that because it was a diesel, it would build up carbon in the system.  And so, whether to justify a catharsis or because it really was helpful, my dad would floor the gas pedal every now and again to blow extra carbon out the tailpipe.

(Let me stop here so that all my cringing climatologist friends can recover their breath…)

This giant black cloud would surface in the rear view mirror, giving us the impression that we were freed from it, that the car would run smoother going forward.

This is the image I carry with me whenever I need to get rid of everything in me that has nothing to do with the Spirit: getting in the pool or sitting in front of Jim or joining my community of faith in song and intentionally blowing it all out.

It’s my other carbon footprint.

I blow out all that carbon that is storing up in me because I’ve been holding my breath: all the anxiety and despair and unforgiveness and ache and guttural lament.

I blow it out.

Watching it dissipate in my rear view mirror.