Blog 261 – Using Meditation and Yoga to Leave The Pit, Part 2 – 25 May 2025

In Blog 260 I talked about the value of yoga as a tool in helping me to meditate and the circumstances in which I began to do yoga.

In this Blog, I will continue to talk about yoga, its usefulness in meditation and how I have used yoga and meditation not just to leave the Pit of Depression, but to stay alive when I should have died.

Although yoga is a set of physical exercises to help with meditation and helping with meditation is the fundamental reason why yoga was invented, yoga is also valuable as a means to physical fitness.

This Blog ignores yoga’s impact on physical fitness.

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I am still alive and writing these Blogs because I learned how to meditate and because I started yoga 10 weeks after I had open heart surgery.

Being able to control the river of chaotic thoughts rushing through my brain meant that when I should have died, I did not die.  When I hovered so very near death, I meditated, used yoga to breathe and I stayed alive when I should have died.  This enabled me to keep living when Margaret needed me more than ever.

If I had not learned at least some yoga, I would not have been able to meditate when my body wanted desperately to stop working.

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Continue to drink these words deeply inside you.

My purpose is to give hope to those who have lost hope. Without hope, we remain lost in the Shadow Lands.

I am continuing to give you information I have put together over a lifetime because I want every one of you to live a life filled with as much joy as your spirits can cope with – with even more joy on top of that.

I want you to be filled with hope.

I want you to know there is no padlock on what you think is the cell that you think you are locked in.

There is no cell and there is no lock.

Walk away from the cell.  It does not exist.

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This is a photo of me on 16 March 2011 at Kalbari National Park in Western Australia.  I was noticeably overweight in 2011.

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This was Pinnacles National Park in Western Australia on 15 March 2011.  The wind shapes the sandstone rocks into figures like these.  Pinnacles National Park is filled with statues just like these.

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This little lizard (it was not really little at all) was not interested in posing to have a photo taken when I was at Coronation Beach, north of Geraldton in Western Australian on 16 March 2011.

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This was the spectacular view I got of Kalbari National Park in Western Australia on 16 March 2011.  Most of Western Australia is desert and there are few permanent water sources.  The Kalbari National Park is spectacular – and it is also a sanctuary where flies breed in their uncountable millions and try to eat all humans who come anywhere near them.

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Within days of Margaret being diagnosed with fatal, untreatable cancer in July 2020, I started experiencing my own extreme health symptoms .  My symptoms included a vastly swollen stomach together with extreme stomach pain, optical migraines (migraine symptoms but without the headaches) and extreme difficulty in being able to breathe.

I was admitted to hospital on 30 April 2021 and my symptoms were so severe, I know I would have died if I had not been in hospital.  On the evening of Tuesday 4 May my life was especially grim.  By 11:00 pm that evening, my inability to breathe was acute and the stomach bloat had me in agonising pain.

To calm my body, I began slow, methodical walking around the hospital room.  While doing my very slow walking around the tiny hospital room, I listened to meditation music through my headphones, willing myself to remain calm.  I knew that if I panicked, my breathing difficulties would turn from acute to deadly.  While doing my slow walks around the room, I practised my yoga breathing exercises. Somehow I was able to stay calm and keep breathing.

My salvation came when the night duty nurse came into the room.  She nurse immediately put tubes in my nostrils and put me on oxygen.  Every four hours after that she made me get up. sit in a special chair and placed me on a nebuliser, with a mask over my nose and mouth.  The nebuliser contained medication to help open my airways.  I had to breathe through this machine for at least 20 minutes every time she made me use it.

I remained on the oxygen until 11.00 am next day.

At about 6.00 am on the Wednesday, I began to believe I would live.  It had been a terrifying night.

When Margaret visited me on the Wednesday morning, she saw a bent, haggard, old man walking towards her as she came out of the lift.  She did not recognise the old man until I hugged her tightly.

Meditation is the only reason I survived that night.  Without meditation, I would have done what any same person would have done in those circumstances.

I would have panicked.

If I had panicked, I would have died.  Nothing could be more certain.

And if I had not started yoga the year before, I would not have been able to meditate when I knew that I could not breathe and that the Angel of Death was waiting nearby to snatch my life.

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I will tell you more tomorrow.