Learning to Breathe
My Yearlong Quest to Bring Calm to My Life
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Priscilla Warner has had a great life: a supportive husband, a flourishing marriage, two loving sons, and a bestselling book, The Faith Club. Despite all her good fortune and success, she suffers from anxiety and panic attacks so debilitating that they leave her unable to breathe. She’s tried self-medicating—in high school, with a hidden flask of vodka—and later, with prescription medications—daily doses of Klonopin with a dark-chocolate chaser. After forty years of hyperventilating, and an overwhelming panic attack that’s the ultimate wake-up call, Warner’s mantra becomes “Neurotic, Heal Thyself.” A spirited New Yorker, she sets out to find her inner Tibetan monk by meditating every day, aiming to rewire her brain and her body and mend her frayed nerves. On this winding path from panic to peace, with its hairpin emotional curves and breathtaking drops, she also delves into a wide range of spiritual and alternative health practices, some serious and some . . . not so much.
Warner tries spiritual chanting, meditative painting, immersion in a Jewish ritual bath, and quasi-hallucinogenic Ayurvedic oil treatments. She encounters mystical rabbis who teach her Kabbalistic lessons, attends silent retreats with compassionate Buddhist mentors, and gains insights from the spiritual leaders, healers, and therapists she meets. Meditating in malls instead of monasteries, Warner becomes a monk in a minivan and calms down long enough to examine her colorful, sometimes frightening family history in a new light, ultimately making peace with her past. And she receives corroboration that she’s healing from a neuroscientist who scans her brain for signs of progress and change.
Written with lively wit and humor, Learning to Breathe is a serious attempt to heal from a painful condition. It’s also a life raft of compassion and hope for people similarly adrift or secretly fearful, as well as an entertaining and inspiring guidebook for anyone facing daily challenges large and small, anyone who is also longing for a sense of peace, self-acceptance, and understanding.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Warner (The Faith Club) suffered her first panic attack at age 15. This debilitating condition resulted in self-medication with nips of vodka, using prescription drugs, and visits with a counselor. By middle age, Warner embarked on her "panic to peace project," a valiant attempt to cure herself with various relaxation techniques. This standard recovery memoir traces her hands-on journey through meditation with Buddhist monks, eye movement desensitization and reprogramming, guided imagery, Trager body therapy, a Jewish ritual bath, Jewish mysticism, yoga, and ayurvedic oil treatments, to name a few. Woven throughout is the backstory about her troubled family and its effects on Warner. The author also struggled with her feelings toward her mother, who suffered from Alzheimer's: "I was forced to move her to a nursing home, a fact that haunted me, because, in her more lucid days, she had told me I'd be murdering her if I ever did that." Warner deftly describes her various treatments. She delves into painful family memories and recounts her panic attacks in detail. For those readers who've experienced this debilitating condition or have family members who have, Warner's account of her yearlong therapy trek will be insightful. Those not affected by panic attacks might want to search for enlightenment in other corners of the bookstore.