An Ode to the Diaphragm
/The Diaphragm and the Pandemic
The pandemic has initiated a significant rupture in established patterns at all scales of society. We should not be looking to go back and yet all paths feel fraught and with unknowns and challenges. We rise to meet these with all of the creativity and courage we can muster in any given moment and our bodies carry the increased uncertainty, often unbeknownst to us, and our diaphragms may be specifically bracing us.
As I write, we are nearing three years of the pandemic. We are still learning how to co-exist with the coronavirus and now, as in the beginning, our breathing is involved. We share air together and so much more. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, in her stunning book, undrowned; Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals presaged conundrum of breathing in a pandemic when she wrote:
What is the scale of breathing? You put your hand on your individual chest as it rises and falters all day. But is that the scale of breathing? You share air and chemical exchange with everyone in the room, everyone you pass by today. Is the scale of breathing within one species? (Gumbs, p. 1)
We are deeply intertwined with one another and are embedded within both the larger and more intimate “ecologies” we inhabit. These “ecologies” include the various systems that overarch and weave through our lives and perpetuate so much of the stress that can impact our breathing. This is compounded by the perpetual toxic insults to our environment, most recently in East Palestine, Ohio. Perhaps, diaphragms contract simply reading about these facts.
I am noticing in myself and in many of the folks I treat that we are carrying a new sublimated stress, catalyzed by the pandemic that is interacting with the constellated stressors each of us already carries based on our lived and ancestral realities. I have had an abiding curiosity since the pandemic started about how folks with developmental or other significant traumas experience the pandemic. I can track in myself a low-grade but persistent added layer of anxiety or dislocated dread - to me it feels like a mash-up of old and familiar feelings with new anxieties stimulated by the pandemic.
The immunologist, Thomas Pradeu posits that immunity is about integrating what is new (as in novel coronavirus) not fighting what is foreign. Pradeu says quite clearly, when it comes to bodies and immunity, we are in perpetual and immersive exchange with our environment, it is not much that viruses or bacteria are foreign to us, rather they are new and thus present an opportunity to come newly into relationship with our environment. Judith Butler references Pradeu’s work in What World Is This? A Pandemic Philosophy:
Pradeu underscores that immunological challenges to that system can be endogenous or exogenous and that what constitutes a challenge is a rupture in the established patterns of interaction (Butler, p. 112).
What’s true is that we are porous. And that the ruptures that have crept and erupted along our societies' many fault lines impact all of us at the individual and collective levels simultaneously. How are our bodies impacted by this persistent amalgamated stressor? Our respiratory and digestive systems are populated by microbes, a multitude of others. Our psychological makeup is constructed by the pastiche of our earliest formative experience with others, they are part of us, generations of a family line, through genes and behavior. What we are is only because of others. And what we might create is only together and with our breathing bodies.
Butler continues, interpreting the work of Pradeu:
Thus, the problem is not the acceptance or rejection of what is foreign but the creation of new patterns of interactivity in the wake of unprecedented challenges to that system. (Butler, p. 112).
I know it isn’t popular or hip or trendy to be talking about the ongoingness of the pandemic, but it is real and I don’t want to go back to anything that was before. I want to maintain my presence in the wake of the initial pandemic and by maintaining that presence continue exploring new patterns of interactivity.
What Does All This Have To Do With Bodywork?
I want to make the case for including hands-on diaphragm work into your treatments. We can and should be working with the diaphragm in our treatments and we can do so in ways that are not invasive or painful for our people. Bodywork should not make you tense up inside. If this is happening, your provider (me included!) needs to know. Diaphragm work can involve some of the more deeply held nervous system patterns and so slow and gentle is most important.
The diaphragm is a myofascial structure with all of the properties of our myofascial system plus the added link to our autonomic nervous system via our breathing. Because of this connection with breath the diaphragm can act as a below-the-level-of-conscious-awareness mediator of our emotional experiences. Some of us learn to engage this at a very young age. Additionally, the diaphragm has significant relationships with our myofascial system, our digestive system, our circulatory system and even specific organs like the heart (via the pericardium), the liver, stomach and kidneys. The vagus nerve passes through the diaphragm, running alongside the esophagus and has some connection at the hiatus.
The Diaphragm as a (silent) Mediator of Emotional Experience
Our breathing patterns, including suppressed or restricted breathing due to emotional factors, can easily become our diaphragm's set point. Because breath is under autonomic control and happens below the level of conscious awareness, these patterns can persist throughout our lifetime and we will have very little awareness of it, except maybe in the most obvious of circumstances, “I couldn’t catch my breath. I just froze and couldn’t breathe…” etc…
It is possible that the diaphragm is one of our earliest sites of somatized stress. Imagine a small person, infant or toddler, in an emotionally challenging or threatening situation. One of the first things they might do is to tense their small body and restrict their breath, hold it even. Contracting the diaphragm and slightly hunching forward as a way to make oneself become smaller, less noticeable, somehow avoid a threat or just try to disappear.
It is a skillful tool to use this big central structure to make our experience of the world more tolerable to our small, young vulnerable selves. And, it can become deeply patterned in ways that are not helpful to both our physiology and our ability to relax and settle into our present shared relationships. Even articulating our inmost selves through language can be impacted by a constricted diaphragm, the way we sometimes struggle to find our voice (voice and breath one and the same) in potent situations.
Over the last few years I have noticed an increase in folks coming in for treatment who have as one of their presenting symptoms dysregulated breathing patterns that show up as speech issues in specific settings, swallowing issues, difficulty eating, etc… The throat is, in some way, an extension of the diaphragm (we will explore this in another post). All of these can be an indicator that the nervous system is overloaded and it's possible that treating the diaphragm can be helpful.
What is the scale of breathing? How far does our breathing extend back into somatic time, the time carried within our bodies, possibly held by the diaphragm first. How does this scale extend outward, into our collectivity, those we encounter with our breath rhythmed words, breath softened eyes. I woke up this morning thinking of Gumbs’ phrase, “the scale of breathing” and thought not just concentric circles of connection but of musical scales, a harmonic of collective breathing. Maybe this is one way we imagine ourselves into new patterns of interactivity.
The Diaphragm in Hand
Like all myofascial structures, the diaphragm responds so well to indirect work; slow, gentle, compression that allows for a passive muscle contraction. I love looking at the swirling fibers on the underside of the diaphragm, I imagine them as the underwater currents in a river that create boils intermittently popping to the surface. Those swirling patterns are an invitation to some gentle and attuned yet potentially deep work. Working slowly and gently invites a person’s interception more fully into the work and the subsequent awareness that interconception offers. In this way folks can become aware of tensions their system is holding, possibly even encounter some of the feelings held there, all at a pace that they can modulate and tolerate.
I have come to believe that the body likes to be explicitly acknowledged for the ways in which it works to support us. When working with folks, simply naming something about the body, the specific place we are working changes how the tissue presents itself, often softening when it hears something that rings true to what it knows. This might sound weird but the spoken acknowledgements are registered in the nervous system and thus into the tissues.
The diaphragm is at the center of our being in so many ways. It is our sustained breathing in and breathing out as individuals and as collectives, groups of people gathering together, refusing the return to a damaging status quo and doing the tricky work of imagining what new patterns of interactivity can be wrung from the rupture initiated by the pandemic. I do believe our work with bodies, with one another studying working with bodies is part of making this imaginal process tangible.
