No, breathing can’t do everything. It can’t cure Human Werewolf Syndrome, allow you to leap tall buildings at a single bound or turn J.D.Vance into The Dancing Queen. But like all Eastern medicines, breathing techniques are brilliant as preventative medicine, a way to retain balance in the body so that milder problems don’t blossom into serious health issues. For most of us, breathing is a passive action, something we just do. Breathe and live, stop breathing and die. But breathing is not binary and it’s not just that we do it that’s important…it’s how we do it.
James Nestor, a noted respiratory researcher, says this: “For me, the perfect breath is this; inhale for 5.5 seconds, then exhale for 5.5 seconds. That’s 5.5 breaths a minute for a total of about 5.5 liters of air. You can practice this perfect breathing for a few minutes or a few hours. When we breathe like this, the circulation in the brain and body will increase while the burden on the heart decreases. All the while, the diaphragm will drop lower and rise higher, allowing more air to enter the lungs and assisting in pushing blood throughout the body. It’s for this reason the diaphragm is sometimes referred to a a ‘second heart,’ because it not only beats to its own rhythm but also affects the rate and strength of the heartbeat.”
Nestor should know. Before his revelations, he’d contracted pneumonia three years running, which is death-rattle territory. He spent most of his time at home, wheezing. Finally, after a scary visit to his doctor, he listened to some medical advice and signed up for an introductory course in breathing. It was there he was introduced to a technique called Sudarshan Kriya. Here’s Nestor on the experience:
“A bushy-browed woman locked the front door, sat in the middle of the group, inserted a cassette tape into a beat-up boom box and pressed ‘play’. She told us to close our eyes, inhale slowly through our noses, then to exhale slowly. Focus on our breath. I kept breathing but nothing happened…no calmness, no tension release. After 20 minutes, I was getting irritable, even thought of getting up and leaving, but I didn’t want to be rude. Then something happened. I wasn’t conscious of any transformation taking place. I never felt myself relax or the swarm of nagging thoughts leave my head. But it was if I’d been taken from one place and deposited somewhere else. It happened in an instant.” If this sounds a lot like someone getting stoned for the first time, James swears there was no marijuana smoke in the room.
“There was something wet on my head. I lifted my hand to wipe it off and noticed my hair was sopping wet. I ran my hand down my face, felt the sting of sweat in my eyes and tasted salt. I looked down at my torso and saw sweat blotches on my sweater and jeans. Everyone had been covered in jackets and hoodies to keep warm but I had somehow sweated through my clothes as if I’d just run a marathon. The instructor asked if I’d been sick or had a fever. I told her I felt perfectly fine. The next day I felt even better. I had a feeling of calm and quiet that I hadn’t experienced in a long time. I slept well. The little things in life didn’t bother me as much. The tension was gone from my shoulders and neck. This feeling lasted for a few days before slowly fading away.” James Nestor went back to the teacher’s place for another session but found only a note and a silver bullet. “My job here is done,” the note said. James could swear he heard hoofbeats in the distance.
Breathe Your Troubles Away
Author Kirkland Smulders, the victim of several panic attacks a day during her postpartum depression, was desperate to get a reprieve from her dilemma, which came with a side dish of relentless insomnia. In a last-ditch attempt to avoid hospitalization, she visited CBT therapist Dr. Robin Hart, who taught her a simple breathing technique that she should start every time she felt a wave of panic coming on. Hart recorded it on her phone and she clung to that recording for dear life. Incredibly, it entirely altered her existence.
“It was so simple,” says Smulders, “just breathe in through the nose for 4 seconds, then hold four seconds and breathe out slowly through pursed lips for 8 seconds. It worked! Gradually, as I practiced the technique on a daily basis, I felt more confident I had a reliable tool to control my panic instead of letting it control me.”
Ten years went by and there were no further attacks. When she felt anxiety rise, Kirkland simply went to her modus operandi. She became absorbed with the science of breathing and interviewed several leading practitioners of the art. In one of her articles, teacher Richie Bostock likened breathing to “a tool, a Swiss army knife which can be used for many different purposes: to calm us down, rev us up, increase our feelings of happiness, help heal our trauma and enhance sexual and spiritual experiences.” Whoa! some of our readers just woke up.
Another Smulders interviewee, Rebecca Dennis of The Breathing Tree used different breathing techniques to release what she called “stuck energy.” “It was a form of somatic therapy which involved lying on the floor, breathing in a certain way and eventually crying a lot due to some emotional release. Then a feeling of exhaustion but also complete peace would sweep over me and I felt cleansed, happier and lighter.” And Tom Hanks tried to tell us there was no crying in therapy.
Requiem For A Non-Believer
“I squeezed her hand three times, our code for I’m here, I care, I love you,” recalls Stuart Sandeman. “I was trying to be strong for her but as I stared across the desk at her doctor, I was barely breathing. It was only a couple of months earlier that my girlfriend, Tiff, had found a pea-sized lump on her chest. Until that day, we’d been having the time of our lives, a couple of 30-year-olds without a care in the world. Then, cancer joined the party and dragged the needle violently across the record of our lives. Now, we were here sitting in silence in the oncology unit of the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles waiting for the specialist to give us the news. Ultimately, we learned the cancer had metastasized, with tumors in her liver, spleen and brain. When Tiff passed away six month later, I just shut down, bouncing between outbursts of anger and complete withdrawal.” Sandeman wound up in a breathing workshop with his mom, a gift he’d bought her for Mother’s Day.
A smiling session leader showed him to a seat in the sharing circle. “Jeez, I thought. I hate this sort of thing. They put on some New Age trance music and everyone in the room began to puff. I opened a wary eye to make sure the whole thing wasn’t some sort of prank and saw my mom was having a high old time, so I stuck with it.”
After a couple of rounds of breathing and shaking and shouting, Stuart was more than ready to can the experiment. Then, a funny thing happened on the way to the exit ramp. “It was SO bizarre,” he smiled. “Suddenly, I could feel electricity surging through my entire body, the kind of vibrations you feel when standing in front of a giant festival speaker. A wave of emotion roared up inside me. And then, for the first time in a very long while, I cried and cried and cried. Not only did I feel the weight of grief being pulled off me, but I felt a lifetime of tension I’d been unknowingly carrying around just dissolve into the atmosphere. I felt a very strong presence surrounding me and had the distinct feeling that Tiff was there. It was weird and powerful and life-changing.”
Who could imagine that something as simple as breathing could transform a life, especially in a rigid doubter like Stuart Sandeman. But it did. “It became a regular practice for me. My energy increased, my mind cleared, my fitness levels went through the roof. Even the voice in my head began to sound a little kinder. I threw myself into the world of breathing, studied a number of modalities. Read research journals, hung out with consultants, yogis, healers and gurus. ME! And get this---eventually I set up my own small private practice with the goal of introducing more people to this life-changing power. It was a miracle.”
Many cultures have a long history of using breathing to help people endure the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. The Chinese qi, Sanskrit prana, Egyptian ka, Hebrew nefesh and ruah, Greek psuche and pneuma, Latin anima and spiritus, Polynesian mana, Iroquoian orenda all highlight the importance of breathing to the body and mind and its connection to something deeper. And none of them care whether you believe in it or not.
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| James Nestor's book on the new science of a lost art |
That’s all, folks….
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