There’s an old joke about a blonde who goes to the hairdresser wearing headphones she refuses to take off. She settles into the chair and promptly falls asleep. Frustrated and unable to work around the headphones, the hairdresser removes them—only for the blonde to suddenly collapse and die. Curious, the hairdresser puts the headphones on to hear what she’d been listening to. A robotic, monotonous voice repeats: “Breathe in, breathe out.”
It’s a terrible joke, one that didn’t elicit a laugh in me at 10 years of age and certainly wouldn’t now. But it’s pertinent, I have learned.
Some of us have forgotten how to breathe.
I was lying flat on the treatment bed in a small physiotherapist’s office in central Auckland. A wheat pack was draped over my stomach, heavy in a soothing way, like a weighted blanket.
“Inhale… exhale… then hold…” said Holley, the breathing physiotherapist.
Under her guidance, my body started detaching, as though I was instead somewhere warm, with sunshine and salt on my skin, looking at a picture of myself at the physio.
This, apparently, is because I have too much carbon dioxide in my blood—the result of faulty breathing patterns. Plenty of oxygen was, in itself, a bit of a shock to the system.
Holley had conducted a number of tests to screen me for faulty breathing. At present, she had her hands cupped under my thoracic area, feeling my upper back muscles—which had lingering tightness, the vestiges of a back injury that took years to overcome—while I breathed.
“They are tight,” she told me matter-of-factly. Another symptom of faulty breathing.
Other indicators included mouth breathing, upper chest breathing, and breathing too fast. She said my respiratory rate was too fast for her to measure (the average adult respiratory rate is 10–14 breaths per minute, my Breathing Works handout informed me).
On my evaluation sheet, she just wrote FAST in capital letters, followed by exclamation marks.
Years of stress (the suspected cause of the back, too), broken noses (one from a longboard to the face in Waikiki), and two septorhinoplasties had taken their toll.
I was sent home with instructions to buy saline nasal sprays and nose strips and a sinus rinse, as well as breathing exercise homework sheets, which I did diligently for the first couple of days, then started to forget. (How many people actually do physio exercises? I feel like they are the same people who floss regularly and also give their undivided attention at PTA meetings.)
Still determined, I tried different ways to make sure I did them—ramping up yoga and meditation classes, doing my breathing exercises in savasana pose, and searching for meditation and breathing retreats abroad. So when I saw a Yoga and Meditation Retreat advertised at a surfing resort in Fiji, I clicked book.
We drive two hours from Denarau. On the side of the road is foliage with the greenness you only ever see in the tropics—a yellowy verdant green, not that dark New Zealand bush green—halter-less horses and, every kilometre or so, a small run-down shop with a shiny red sign dominated by the Coca-Cola logo. The multinational has unashamedly dominated these parts; Pepsi doesn’t even have a shoe in. The signs are often flasher than the premises, which carry much the same in terms of products: Tip Top ice cream, cans of Pringles, rows and rows of Coca-Cola, some packets of dried peas, and bhuja mix.
We turn off somewhere—signs aren’t a particularly strong fixture in these parts, apart from Coca-Cola ones. The driver of the van tells us we will quickly stop at his village. Three hundred people live there, he says, in small concrete houses with corrugated iron roofs. The driver’s young grandson sprints across the grass, barefoot and wearing a black Emirates Team New Zealand T-shirt and a blue Paw Patrol schoolbag.
Just beyond the cluster of houses is the sea—the land is waterfront, I tell the driver. “Expensive in New Zealand,” I add in that pidgin-type English us Westerners tend to adopt when talking to non-native speakers. He laughs. “Yes,” he says simply.
More villages go by, replicas of one another. The road winds around the coast like a grey ribbon. To our right is the sea, flat and docile until the reefs—a kilometre or more out—where the white crests of waves foam and die. They look small from back here, on the road.
When we arrive at the surf retreat, lunch has already been prepared. The accommodation has a cosy feel—timber, rustic, and clean. For the first evening’s yoga session, we begin and finish with breathing exercises—fitting—and I am soothed by the yoga teacher’s gentle voice. Later, we convene in the dining area for papaya salad and mains. In the evening, I fall asleep reading Sally Rooney’s Normal People to the low thrum of the ceiling fan and the distant huffing barks of dogs on neighbouring properties. I do not dream of breathing; instead, I have weird dreams about sex that I am grateful to wake from.
The next day, after a gentle session of hatha yoga, we ride in a boat to a reef break not far from the resort. Dolphins briefly slide up near the bow and then slip away like salmon. The water is very blue but not calm—it has a bit of chop from the wind. Smothered on my face is pink zinc, strapped to my head is a light purple surf hat. All of this makes me feel like Mark Zuckerberg. This is not a good thing.
The break is a short paddle out from the boat. Here, I learn I am perilously unfit. My cousin paddles with ease—she is an Olympian triathlete—despite the fact it is her first time surfing. I have surfed on and off for the past two decades and have stayed at an embarrassing level of skill. Today I learn that in the last five years of having children and not surfing, I have become even worse (beyond the confines of possibility? But here we are).
I stand up, fall, eat sh*t, over and over again. I get back into the boat frustrated and belligerent.
The next day, we go to Leftovers, which the guides say is named that as it is the break of “last resort.” After a while in the water, the waves start to feel like towering walls. We are tired; our arms are sore. I paddle with my belly on the board until my triceps burn, and then climb onto my knees and monkey paddle. I bail on every single wave.
After one particularly spectacular fall forward, my 9ft longboard flinging up into the air until the leg rope is taut, I look back and see the biggest set of the day come through. And the waves are already broken. And I don’t have my board anywhere near my hands. My cousin is stretched on her board nearby.
“How do we get under the waves when they are already broken?” I can hear her yell.
We’ve managed to barrel roll under a few, but to attempt that now would be pure idiocy.
“Just throw your board!” I yell. There are no other people here; we are only a danger to each other. Except, maybe, the reef, which is starting to look awfully close.
The wave is approaching now, even bigger than it looked before. I hold my breath and duck. The blue underbelly of the wave lurches over my head. The board is dragging me backward over the reef. It is close, but it’s also alive—coral of all colours, not bleached and bare like some of the coral reefs around popular holiday destinations—and rather sharp-looking, like it would take the side of your face off in one foul swoop.
Once I feel the lull, I come up for air, a huge big gasp, and see the next wave coming. I go under again.
It is when I am underwater that I realise something: the ocean is opening my nostrils more than any saline solution spray or sinus rinse ever has. And when I pop up again, and frantically grab my leg rope and pull it towards me so I can climb on my board again, I hear myself breathe in deeply, right from my belly.
I paddle out from the inside, closer to the boat. I am unfit and my breaths are deep and heavy, but the sea has cleared my nose and my chest, and breathing seems like the natural process—the necessity—that it is, and not something that is difficult, restrained by an unyielding ribcage.
Why is it always nature that forces us to do the things that are most natural?
That night at yoga, the breaths come easily; my nasal passages feel opened and my chest clear. My diaphragm moves with ease.
The next day at Frigates, a surf break that terrifies, I ride the wave a little more like I used to. Paddling seems easier, as though I’ve gotten fitter in a matter of days.
It’s not fixed, of course. This may take time. But for now, I’m grateful for eating sh*t on this reef and for nature reminding me how natural it is for me to breathe.
hannah norton writes 