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Managing infant wheeze (post-viral wheeze)

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Witnessing your small child fighting for breath can be a harrowing experience. Wheeze affects huge numbers of pre-school children but there's very little information out there for stressed, desperate parents who don't want to just hang on until their children 'probably grow out of it' (which is essentially the medical position on wheeze) and want to find some way to relieve their symptoms now. Our youngest daughter first developed wheeze shortly after turning two years old. Over a few months during the autumn and winter of 2020 she suffered repeated episodes which grew in severity. In December of that year she was hospitalised for nearly four weeks, was intubated and spent over two days on a ventilator. This terrible experience of powerlessness as she nearly died propelled me into a years-long search to understand and hopefully cure her condition. I am very pleased to say that she is now in excellent health and suffers only occasional and mild episodes of wheeze. Her ep
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How to receive a massage

Getting a massage for the first time, or from a therapist you’ve never met before, can be a nerve-wracking experience. Let’s face it: getting near-naked in a room with a total stranger for an hour or more while said stranger touches you all over your body – sometimes in places where nobody has touched you for a long time, or perhaps ever – well, it’s just a bit… extraordinary, isn’t it? If you’re the kind of person for whom the thought of this provokes anxiety, then don’t worry – you’re not alone. In fact, I’ll let you into a little secret. I only got my first proper massage – one where you undress and get on a couch and a trained professional puts oil on you and moves your tissues around – three years ago! No, that wasn’t a typo. Despite giving and receiving lots of massage during my time as an actor – in rehearsals and warming up for shows – I never thought I was the getting-near-naked-in-a-room-with-a-total-stranger type. The thought of it – the intimacy, the vulnera
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Location: Colenso Rd, Lower Clapton, London E5 0SL, UK
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How to breathe

“Calm is retained by the controlled exhalation or retention of the breath.”  Patanjali, Yoga Sutra 1.34, Book 1  This post was first published on the Healing Space blog . Are you breathing right now? Go on, have a check. Look down there at your torso and see if it’s rising and falling. If you can’t be bothered to move your head, see if you can feel the chest and belly moving in and out, up and down. The feeling of air passing through the nostrils is another tell-tale sign that you are breathing. You are? Good. See? You didn’t need any instruction on how to breathe after all – it happens all the time without you even thinking about it. Phew! Did you notice a subtle shift though, when you started paying attention to your breathing? Did your breathing suddenly become faltering, discontinuos… sticky? Did you find that you needed to consciously decide when to start and stop your in breaths and out breaths? Are you finding that it’s now quite difficult to not be conscious of you
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