By Nelson VanTassel GUEST COLUMNIST
I awoke one morning not too long ago, feeling the full weight of fall. I was burnt out, depressed and simply did not want to get out of bed. I found myself placing my hands over my heart space and taking a large inhale, eyes closed, followed by a long exhale, an intentional smile, and the barely audible words, “I love you, Nelly.” It’s my mantra to start every day and often to get through most days in the fall.
Fall has always been a very difficult season for me. I have lost friends in the fall, gone through breakups, and historically I become very depressed. This year I wanted to try something new. Like many of you reading this, I have wished away many a fall craving the sensation of once again sliding down frozen water with my friends or grinning ear to ear as I receive the first divine facial covering of cold smoke powder. This year I wanted something different. I wanted to further engage in a newer activity and try to be more aware of the present and my accompanying breath.
As I prepared for hunting season and started to say goodbye to boating and biking season, I started to feel the all-too-familiar sadness, anxiety and lack of capacity creep in. I had hoped that learning to shoot my bow and the time scouting would pay off, but not in the ways one might think. Honestly, I have not enjoyed hunting much in the past. It is a lot of hiking, and I hate hiking. The process of filling my freezer and feeding myself, friends and family is very spiritual for me and in that, taking another being’s life is not necessarily something I look forward to.
Going into this season with a different mindset I found myself connecting to my breath like never before. Stopping and reminding myself how much I love myself during a prolonged exhale while standing atop a mountain. A heightened awareness of the present helped me realize just how thankful I really am for the spaces I am capable of occupying. Looking across a valley I had gazed upon hundreds of times before, I noticed features I had been oblivious to before, and this time, they brought a smile to my face. As the fall continued on, I found myself in the uncomfortable spaces I have in seasons past, but this year, even with major loss and mourning, I found it not to be as sharp. I had something to look forward to, prepare for, and when even that was not enough to fend off the sadness, I found myself connecting to my breath more than ever before. This fall I started to learn to sit in the moment and control one of the few things I can actually control: my breath and the connection to it.
In the past two years I have just started to learn the power of breath. I already knew very well how each breath brought oxygen in to bind to hemoglobin, the oxygen carrier for our body. Which then in turn delivers oxygen to every one of our oxygen-starved cells in the body. More recently I have begun to learn firsthand the less obvious—but still nearly as critical—power the breath possesses to ground and redirect. I have started to learn that through breath I can stop a negative thought cycle and redirect to the present, to reality. When anxious, feeling the weight of the world, and overwhelmed, feeling that I can barely handle another moment, my breath can calm my nervous system, redirect my thoughts, and bring me back to a functioning space.
By no means am I telling everyone to start hunting. I do ask each of us to find something new to try next fall. A dear friend told me, “When the world is too scary, too loud, too much: stop consuming, start creating.” Learn how to knit, start drawing, learn a new language, start hunting, start climbing at BASE, ask your neighbor to go for a weekly walk—the options are endless, but I encourage us to create and engage with our breath, one of the few things we can truly control.
As we head into winter and once again get back to skiing, snowboarding, monoskiing, blading and the like, I ask us to sit with ourselves in reflection. I encourage you to reflect on this past fall with love and kindness and ask yourself how you did. Did you distract, numb, turn to coping mechanisms you know to be unhealthy? Where did you succeed? In what areas can you be proud of yourself? In our reflection my hope is that we can see areas to improve, things we are proud of, and healthier coping mechanisms for next fall or even practices we can begin to implement immediately so when things are difficult again, they are already a part of our routines. I hope you can connect to your breath and find space to simply be as we continue to wait for winter to fully pick us up in her loving embrace.
In this beautiful community we have a plethora of resources available for mental health! In direct relation to what I have written about, Santosha Wellness Center has offered breathwork practices, and any yoga class they offer will bring awareness to one’s breath. Wellness In Action is hosting a grief group on Wednesday evenings through Dec. 11 from 6 to 7 p.m. at their office. Monthly Holistic Emotional First Aid circles are offered at Moving Mountains from 5:45 to 6:45 p.m., and the next sessions will be Dec. 17 and Jan. 28. Wellness in Action also offers counseling from many different counselors, and they also offer scholarships and sliding scale payment.
Nelson VanTassel is passionate about mental health and the Big Sky community. He works as a ski patroller at Big Sky Resort and can be found skiing or snowboarding almost every day. He builds houses in the summer, spending as much time as possible on his bike or on the river.
