One Breath At A Time

Wait! Before you stop reading, hear me out! I know exactly what some of you are thinking because I thought the same thing. 

Yoga? That’s for impossibly flexible people in snug pants drinking fancy coffee. It’s for people named “Zephyr” with man buns. It’s scented oils. It’s tiny gongs and chanting. That was certainly my take on yoga back in the day. 

For 29 years, I worked in a 911 center as a calltaker, emergency dispatcher, CTO, supervisor, manager, and eventually director. If there was a position in the center, chances are I sat in it, generally nursing aches, pains, and ridiculous amounts of stress along the way. 

Today, after retiring in 2023, I travel the country teaching and speaking for The Healthy Dispatcher. Ironically, that now includes teaching yoga to emergency dispatchers. 

I didn’t discover yoga until the final years of my career, and man, do I wish it had come along sooner. 

For most of my adult life, I was a weight lifting guy. I still am. Like a lot of guys, I tended to overestimate my abilities when it came to throwing around iron. To the casual observer, I’m probably closer to Michael Cera than Arnold Schwarzenegger. Inside my head, however, I was full Schwarzenegger. 

Years of lifting and years of sitting in dispatch chairs left me stiff, sore, and eventually dealing with an injury that finally convinced me (reluctantly) to try yoga. 

I became convinced it was for me almost immediately. The biggest benefit wasn’t even flexibility or balance. It was in dealing with my stress. 

If you’re an emergency dispatcher, stress isn’t an occasional visitor. It’s a roommate. It lives in the headset, the radio traffic, the staffing shortage, the difficult caller, and the call that often tags along uninvited on the drive home, riding shotgun. 

For years, I thought yoga was about stretching. It turns out it’s really about breathing. 

When you’re holding a pose and everything in you wants to quit, the instruction is simple: breathe, stay present, and work through the discomfort. 

Sound familiar? 

That lesson followed me far beyond the yoga mat. It helped me navigate leadership challenges, lead through Covid, and cope when my wife was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and our family’s future suddenly felt a lot less certain. 

Yoga didn’t remove those stresses. It changed how I responded to them. One breath at a time. 

Eventually, I became enough of a believer that I became an instructor myself and started teaching yoga classes to employees during my years as director. 

Most discovered what I had: Yoga wasn’t what they thought it was. 

At its core, yoga is remarkably simple. You pay attention to your breathing, move your body, and give yourself permission to be fully present for a little while. 

If I’ve even sort of convinced you to give yoga a go, don’t worry about squeezing into a pair of form-fitting pants people can see your pulse through and wandering into a pro studio full of chanting yogis. Start at home. Be comfy. Find a class for newcomers on YouTube or download a yoga app. Most offer free versions and beginner-friendly programs. 

Give yourself some grace and let the stretching, breathing, and movement do their work. 

Over time, yoga showed me something I didn’t know I was looking for. The mat (or the living room carpet) became a place of peace for someone who struggled to quiet the voices in his head. 

Emergency dispatchers spend their careers surrounded by noise, much of it the endless commentary generated by our own minds. 

Yoga gives all of that a place to settle down for a little while. Not forever. Just long enough to catch our breath, settle our thoughts, and reconnect with ourselves. 

So, if you’ve spent years telling yourself you’re not flexible enough for yoga, let me save you some time: You’re exactly flexible enough. 

In fact, the people who think they’re least suited for yoga are often the ones who benefit from it most. 

Trust me, I know. I was one of them.