Be still...

I woke up with a start. I had been trying to sleep for a few hours after arriving home from a family trip to Epol in Marilog (in the mountain area of Davao City), sick to the bone with a rather nasty strain of flu, but rest would not come easy because I was having chills and I was coughing and sneezing constantly. When I finally I did doze off it was to a fitful state, and after only a few minutes I woke up with a start: I was having difficulty breathing, and I felt like I was drowning.

I got up out of bed to tell my wife – who was in the shower at the time – what I was feeling, and she immediately knew what it was: “You’re hyperventilating, Jon. Just relax. Breathe slowly.” She knew what she was talking about: when she was younger she had frequent bouts with hyperventilation, and early in our marriage we had to rush to the emergency room once because of it. It took a while before we realized what was happening to her: according to Webster, hyperventilation is “rapid shallow breathing that provides the body with an excess of oxygen and a deficit of carbon dioxide. It most commonly occurs as a manifestation of anxiety or hysteria.”

Well anxiety and hysteria are just words until you go through them, and I went through both and ended up in a panic as I battled with my first bout with hyperventilation. It felt like the more I breathed, the less oxygen I could get, and that made for a vicious cycle that drove me further into what I can now only describe as insanity. My wife – not quite done with her shower and hair still dripping over hastily worn shirt and shorts – had to rush me to the emergency room to calm me down. On the way I was screaming at the top of my lungs, and I became so irrational that I wanted to either sleep or die on the spot just to get rid of the awful feeling.

It’s a funny thing about hyperventilation: you think you’re not getting any air when you’re actually getting too much of it. It can be triggered by any number of things (stress, sickness, excitement), and at its worst it can lead to panic as the mind begins to think it’s not getting any air. Like I said, it’s a vicious cycle: the more you gasp, the more oxygen you get, and the worse off you are. Oxygen is absolutely necessary to keep us alive, but too much of it trips the brain into overdrive and can literally drive you crazy.

But for all its complexities and seeming contradictions, hyperventilation, as I found out at the emergency room, is easy to treat: just put a brown paper bag over your nose and mouth, breathe, and relax. The paper bag makes you breathe in your own carbon dioxide and rids your body of excess oxygen, but it’s the “relax” part that’s crucial: unless you decide to believe that this overly simple cure will make you feel better, the panic will not go away. It is rather counter-intuitive because the body wants to gasp for air, but relaxing is the only way to get rid of hyperventilation. “Relax, be still,” my wife repeated to me over and over as I struggled to breathe into a paper bag.

Relax. Be still. There’s got to be a life lesson there…

Psalm 46:10: “Be still, and know that I am God.”

When troubles afflict us, our instinct is to fight, move, do what we can to solve the problem. In our own power, however, such movements add up to no more than the flailing of the arms that only dig us deeper into the mess. It’s like hyperventilation: the more we fight, the worse off we are.

Be still, God says, and know that I am God.

It’s not being fatalistic, or hanging up one’s gloves and giving up: it’s understanding that God is in control and that only when we let Him guide our paths will we ever win over our troubles. I’ve been through my own share of trials and tribulations, and I’ve learned that it never profits me to try and fight them on my own: God has to be there from the beginning, and I have to learn to be still and know that He is who He says He is.

“He makes wars cease to the end of the earth. He breaks the bow, and shatters the spear. He burns the chariots in the fire.

‘Be still, and know that I am God.’“