Introduction to Breathing techniques

Breathing

There is so much written about our breathing and how we can use it for different purposes. Here we provide some background on the role of breathing in our exercises and outline the basic ways you can control or change your breath to change your emotional state. Most of us have experienced how breathing differently makes a difference and have enjoyed the benefits of simple changes to how we breathe.

If you are unfamiliar with breathing techniques, it’s worth touching briefly on how we can use our breathing.

Our breathing is usually managed unconsciously to meet the needs of our body. It’s a vital bodily process delivering the oxygen we need on the inhale and removing the waste gasses on the exhale. Since breathing happens automatically, we typically only become aware of breathing when exertion, danger or stress disrupts our normal function and we become ‘out of breath’. This change in our breathing often alerts us and only then do we become consciously aware of our breath.

Humans have some voluntary control of breathing and we can change our breathing to regulate emotions, create focus and achieve peak physical performance. Humans have experimented with this control for thousands of years, resulting in a plethora of breathing techniques, each designed to give us different effects and used in different circumstances to generate different results. We can breathe to energise, to arouse, or to relax, to gain clarity, or to slow down. When we breathe with a conscious intent, we can change our experience of breathing and what it does for us.

There are four parts or elements to each breath.

You know of all this; you do it all the time, but conscious awareness changes everything. Watch your breathing as your read on.

We inhale the new fresh air, we hold, we exhale, and then we hold again. For most of us in normal breathing mode, the inhale and exhale are a similar length and the hold is momentary.

When we consciously control our breath, we can vary any or all of these elements at will.

As we breathe, we can:

• Notice the movement and location of the air with each element.
• Notice and control the ratio of time spent in each element, the inhale, holding with full lungs, the exhale and holding with empty lungs.
• Notice and control the extent to which we fill our lungs with each breath we take.
• Breath in or out through our nose or mouth or through both.
• Breathe into our belly or into our chest.

We have a range of options to vary each element of the breath and can create different results with each variation. Generally, inhales are energising and we typically use longer inhales with shorter holds to energise and invigorate ourselves. Exhales are cleansing or relaxing and we typically use longer exhales and longer holds to calm down and release negative emotions.

Slowing the breath and focussing on breathing through the belly is a great way to slow down and get a moment of calm in almost any situation.

As we pay more attention to our breath, it’s possible to sense more subtle changes resulting from how we breathe. Perhaps we can begin to notice a corresponding movement in our body with each inhale and exhale. Something independent from the movement of the air itself that relates to energy flows within our body. Kozo Nishino presents a great summary of this in his book, The Breath of Life: Using the Power of Ki for Maximum Vitality.

For a specific example of a breathing technique check out Buteyko breathing.

Implementation

We use breathing as an integral part of the exercises we specify in the book and develop in the challenge recordings

In Exercise 2 of the challenge we begin to look at breathing and how we can use it as a tool to help us work with our Monkeys.

In the early exercises we use breathing as a focus to give us something to do as we rally do something else.

Later in the exercises we begin to use the breath in more constructive ways and in the challenge exercise recordings we develop this theme considerably.

If you decide to continue your practice after the first 12 weeks or so breathing can fuel a whole range of interesting exciting and useful explorations from View point three.

These can include:

• Scan activities within your own body or elsewhere
• Searching for creative solutions
• Looking for ideas
• Dealing with physical or mental setbacks