CPAPmanLives

My previous post was short and distressing. The Cman sounded desperate as his super powers were fading. The CPAP mask was not working. In fact, it was causing sleep depervation. When the mask pops loose it's pretty dramatic when, pit-issssh sssshhh, compressed air starts spraying into your eye and it is a very disturbing way to be woken up. Between sleep deprecation and repeatedly giving up on the CPAP in the middle of the night and suffering from apnia. Cpapman was lost. His last act was to call out for help in the form of a blog post. Fortunately his alter ego "the man" never runs from his responsabilities as a dad, even when not sleeping or suffocating when he sleeps. Shortly after Cpapman's call for help the Man was desperately trying to get his youngest daughter ready for ballet. Struggling with the dreaded bunn when the solution crawled into his foggy and muddled thoughts, bobby-pins. Bobby pins of course. Could the solution possibly be so simple and inexpensive

I need a new mask or new headgear or something. When the pressure picks up at night the Velcro pops loose and I have a blowout and in my sleepy frustration I give i up and shut her down. Do something Cman! Don't loose them gains!

I shared a Mindfulness excersice with my nine year old daughter 

  It's been a while since I've felt like posting as CPAPman. A lot of the gifts I've received since starting to breathe while I sleep have begun to feel quite common place and normal. What a shell of a human being I must have been prior to becoming The C-man if seeing beauty and clear thinking felt like some kind of supernatural power. Been almost a year since my diagnosis of sever sleep apnea. The benefits of sleeping with my CPAP machine have been unbelievable, life changing, but still to this day I struggle with the mask. The nightly ritual of filling with water, relaxing with a book or blogging until I'm tired then strapping on the mask. Waking when the pressure cranks up and pops the mask loose and the loud high pressure stream of air leaks into my eye with a pitshishshshshshshsh. The struggle is worth it, but it is still a struggle. The nightmares that used to wake me all through the night when the apnea would get really bad are gone. More accurate is that I don&

I am an empath. Always have been always will be. Now that I breathe at night while I sleep I have come to terms with what I am.  I feel what other people feel.  My big sister was deaf. She was raised in a "main streaming" program that was meant to train her to live a full life outside of the deaf community. My personal oppinion is that this program was bullshit, but I also must admit it worked.  Within the confines of this program we siblings were not allowed to learn sign language. My sister had to read lipps. As her little brother I grew up lip reading with my sister. We would talk to each other without using our voices. As adults my brother and I had difficulty using our voices with our sister, but we could lip away with her from across the room. As her little interprater growing up she would often look to me when she would miss what was being said and I would lip it to her. It was quite a parlor trick, but was really way, way more than that.  Now that she's gone a

If you were to read #7 Insight, you may sense my apprehension in divulging the actual insight that inspired the post. It is terrifying to explore the deepest parts of yourself that lay hidden for good reason. I guess I have achieved a comfort level with my own unique kind of crazy and as CPAPman developed a level of understanding worth articulating.  Prescience is not a superpower. It was a curse actually. When some of my dreams or nightmares or memories would end upcoming true. When dejavue or coincidence or augury became so common place I had to ignore it to lead a somewhat normal life.  First, let me lay some ground work and background so this insight may be more easily understood. Secondly, I wish to say it plainly and put this thing to rest. pre·science [ˈpreSH(ē)əns, ˈprēSH(ē)əns] NOUN presciences (plural noun) the fact of knowing something before it takes place; foreknowledge: "with extraordinary prescience, Jung actually predicted the Nazi eruption" synonyms:

Not only am I more able to love I am more able to be loved. Hate has been surplanted. Love has been planted. It bears the fruit of insight, mercy and justice. Looking back, I cut this one a little short. Love. What can I say about it. It's what makes life worth living. It is the force that keeps it all together. The ultimate power of attraction. I once wrote God is love or is it Love is God. How both are only possible when you are completely free to choose. Free to decide if even either exists. You can't see either one. But the works of both are immeasurable.  I think since becoming the Cman Love is again what it should be for me. A choice. When I was suffocating at night my life was a struggle. Love sustained me. God carried me. They woke me up in the middle of the night to save me. Through the fog of that life they guided me. They were the light in my darkened world. Without them I would not have survived. Now in the light of this new day I choose to pay them forward. I choos

Believing the voice of my heart. Listening to the mind, body and spirit. Guided by my conscience and driven by my soul. Knowing, by Faith, what is right and good. By great Faith being in the right. In Faith doing what is good. For the sake of doing good. Believing in things that can't be proven. Having Faith in things that cannot be seen. What cannot be seen? Love. I believe in love. I have faith in love. To love. Being loved. It is the greatest force in the Universe. It is the power of attraction. It binds us and sets us free.  Faith is Love. What else cannot be seen. God. I believe in God. I have Faith in God. I believe nearness to God is heaven and absence of God hell. I have Faith he loves me. He loves me and set me free. Being free gives me the power to love. I choose to love God. I choose to have Faith. I choose to have Faith in God. 

Bravery is not lack of fear. Quite the opposite. It is the power to act in the face of great fear where being brave creates powerful courage. The more we act brave while when we feel scared the greater and more reliable our Courage becomes.

Optimism is the most important aspect of hope. I no longer dwell on the worst that can happen and strive to focus on the best. What is the best possible outcome? Hope allows me the required optimism to see a better future. A better tomorrow. A better later today. A better right now. Hope always seemed so futile. So foolish. Why set myself up for disappointment? 

I don't call this a superpower. Not yet. It could be the superpower if I ever master it. Insight. It came to me several days ago. I couldn't explain it to myself, I wasn't really sure what had happen. A small burst of energy in my mind radiating through my heart and touching my soul. It was wonderful. It was an idea. Or more specifically the coming together of many ideas. I don't remember the idea, but the effect on my mind, body and spirit were unforgettable. When the connection was made there was a rush of some kind of new energy and I became, for the lack of a better word, high. I had found meaning where previously there was none. A void of understanding was filled with something new to me. Insight. Two thoughts, two ideas, garnered from separate experiences, one old one new synergistically uniting to form new meaning. Illuminating understanding and inducing euphoria. I had gained insight. I had learned something very specially about myself and felt really really goo

I can breathe. No seriously, it's an important superpower. One that should not be taken for granted. I now breathe to calm my mighty monkey brain. I breathe in I breath out I breathe in I breathe out I breathe in I breathe. That is all I do. I think in I think out I think in I think out I think in I think. That is all I think. That is all I do. I return to my breath. I am alive. I become mindful of that fact. I calm the monkey. I find the space. In it I am. Meditation it is, but I no longer call it that. I call it breathing. Breathing with a mask on my face pushing forced air past my fat pie-whole night after night allows me to breathe deeper than ever before. Taking deeper breaths all night long allow me to take daytime deep breaths when needed to find some mindfulness. Two or three controlled deep breaths helps me find the space behind the waterfall. I have asthma. Not as bad as I always thought. For as long as I can remember I would sleep with an inhaler next to my bed. Some

Spending so many years ignoring the obvious and allowing my ego and pride to blind me. I walked a tightrope every night between this world and the next. I have been humbled by sleep apnea and its' ability to strangle the life out me. Humbled that I was unaware what was happening while I slept. Snoring is humbling enough on its' own. Knowing I almost snored myself to death is something different all together. I am not who I thought I was. I am vincible. I am not doomed. There was something wrong with me, but it was not what I thought it was. I was not going crazy. I was dieing. Night after night. Nightmare after nightmare. Year after year. Literally suffocating. Literally not sleeping. Coping. Failing. The struggle was real. Humbled. I am lucky to be alive.

Forgiving others is easy. It is not a super-power. I learned early in life the freedom you earn by forgiving those who have wronged you. They do not even have to know. When you forgive someone in your heart it lifts your soul. Forgiveness is a gift you give yourself. You are released from the burden someone else has placed on you. You put it down. You let it go. You walk away. It's very powerful. Makes you want to share it. The freedom. I've learned you can not offer forgiveness. It must be a request. If not sought it is an insult. It is better to ask for it. Asking the offender for forgiveness is a difficult thing to do. Goes against human nature. Touching the Divine is never easy. When you give a gift and it is refused the gift stays with the giver. When you are free and you offer freedom your gift need not be appreciated to have value. My new Superpower is the ability to forgive myself. I have wronged myself in so many ways. I have failed too many times to count. But the f

This one is a little tricky, I have spent a lifetime avoiding my true nature and my powerful emotions. I have always been an emotional guy. It is not something easily hidden. Nothing makes people more uncomfortable than a grown man crying. It is not natural. I learn early in life to suck down deep the crying emotions until I could be alone. An unfortunate side effect of this skill was being a mess when I found myself alone. I say, "crying emotions" because recently using my newly found clear thinking have discovered happy and sad, joy and sorrow, bravery and fear are all the two sides of the same coin. Living proof of the dichotomy on man. Different triggers on the same gun. Different players on the same team. Different illusions in the same analogy. Since I stopped suffocating at night my emotions have become raw. Visceral. Unavoidable. The screaming voice of my heart. Not hard to follow your heart if it has been torn out of your chest. Or swells to twice its' size. Fe

Embarrassing to admit, but clear thinking is new to me. Being able to articulate what it has been like being me is something I have never been able to do. Attention Deficit Disorder and Dyslexia have been with me my whole life. I like to think they no longer define me, but they have left their mark. You might say I overcame these conditions, but more precisely I have come to live with them. I learn to do things differently than most people. In dealing with my deficit in attention I learn to pick my targets carefully, I need to have a genuine interest in something and generate passion for it to sustain my focus. When I do this I can actually achieve hyper-focus, imagine that. When I get excited about something nothing can distract me from it. It's a little scary. When I find a book I love I loose myself in it. That's how I learn to read. I would find the story no matter what way the letters faced. I found that if I could love it I could do it. So I loved to read. Slowly at first

https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5060567820397022099#editor/target=post;postID=9161363098539987397;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=13;src=postname In light of what I know now. This is crazy. In a dream: "I struggle to breath and can a little, but start to gasp and suffocate, but cannot lift my arms to clear what is choking my face. Slowly I start to die again and start to kick my legs, but they won't move. Shake my head back and forth and as I gasp my last breathe again think I hear my deaf sister scream your still alive. Then I wake up in a cold sweat, gasping for air."