“Calm is retained by the controlled exhalation or retention of the breath.”
― Patanjali, Yoga Sutra 1.34, Book 1
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 your breathing?
Don't worry - that's all normal. Breathing is one of those strange bodily functions that is both voluntary and involuntary. If you pay no attention to the breath it happens all by itself. If you do pay attention, you can consciously control the rate at which you breathe, the depth of your breathing, how long you pause between different phases of the breath and even which muscles you use to pull air into your lungs and push it out again. Weird, isn't it?
When our breathing is unconscious, it is regulated by the body's autonomic nervous system which is, as the name suggests, automatic. It changes the rate and depth of breathing in response to changes that it detects in the body, such as elevated or lowered levels of carbon dioxide in the blood or the mind’s recognition of a nearby threat.
The autonomic nervous system has two main modes. When we're at rest, the parasympathetic mode dominates and our breathing is slow and shallow. Most of the work of breathing is done by the diaphragm - a dome-shaped muscle that sits below the lungs and above the organs of digestion. When the diaphragm contracts, pushing the belly out, it increases the volume of the chest cavity, pulling air into the lungs. When the diaphragm relaxes, air is pushed out.
When we exercise, or when we're in a 'fight-flight-or-freeze' scenario, the body's requirement for oxygen increases and the sympathetic mode of the autonomic nervous system starts to take control, increasing the rate of breathing and recruiting the muscles between the ribs and around the rib cage so that the volume of the chest cavity, and the volume of air taken in and pushed out with each breath, can increase even more.
This is the body's innate intelligence in action, reacting moment-by-moment to changes in the system to ensure that the tissues have enough oxygen (and not too much carbon dioxide) to carry out their essential functions. All exactly as nature intended. Except that nature didn't account for modernity.
Modern life puts us in stressful situations almost constantly. Social encounters with strangers, time pressure, buzzing phones and bank balances can all prompt the mind to evoke a threat response and that familiar knot in the stomach. We protect our soft underbellies by tightening up in the centre, pulling our shoulders up and forward to expose more of our protective back, breathing quickly from the chest in preparation for fight-flight-freeze. Sometimes we notice this, sometimes we don't. But every time this happens it leaves a residue of tension, a memory in the muscles and fascia, and a slightly greater propensity for us to hold ourselves in this posture continually.
Sound healer Tasha Ponton told me the other day that after a wild animal has been through a stressful experience it will shake itself to release the tension. Human beings have lost touch with their wild nature and tend not to use tricks like this, even though most of us have felt the emotional release that often accompanies dancing wildly. Instead, our emotions remain trapped in the flesh, gravitating to those parts of us which are bonier, less sensitive, less vulnerable - the back, the shoulders, the hips, the jaw - the parts to which we seldom direct our attention. Until they start to scream out for our attention with aches and pains, and we find ourselves searching the internet for a good massage therapist.
Massage is very effective when it comes to releasing these tensions held in the body, but what can we do to stop them accumulating in the first place? Changing the way you breathe may well hold the key. In my massage work, it became apparent very early on that people's breathing patterns would often change radically between the start of a treatment and the end, and that by encouraging my clients to take slower, deeper breaths they could be brought to states of relaxation much more quickly. Switching on the parasympathetic nervous system through massage promotes calmer, slower breathing, mostly using the diaphragm muscle, but the process also works in reverse. By deliberately, consciously breathing with our diaphragm in a calm, slow way, we can bring the parasympathetic nervous system online which then inhibits the production of stress hormones, slows the heart rate, and promotes digestion and general physical relaxation.
“When one gives undivided attention to the (vital) breath, and brings it to the utmost degree of pliancy, he can become as a tender babe.” ― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
Of course, various traditions have known this for centuries, even though they didn't talk in terms of sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. In Pranayama, one of the eight limbs of Rāja yoga, breath is synonymous with life force, pure consciousness. Yogis use control of the breath to clear and purify their life-force channels (nadis), bringing health to body and mind, as well as to attain deeper states of meditation. In Daoism, which underpins Chinese medicine, breathing is one of the most important ways that one acquires qi, which can also be thought of as life force or energy. Qigong exercises include many kinds of breathing practices which are used to direct or modulate the flow of qi in different parts of the body. Some body-scanning meditations from Buddhist traditions also harness the power of the breath to systematically identify and release tension held in the body.
These kinds of insights and practices from Eastern cultures did filter through to the West - the early Greek medical writers also placed human vitality in the breath - and have only partly been obscured by modern scientific thought which predominantly sees the breath as a collection of molecules of nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide. These days, you can access countless free hours of instruction on almost any approach to the breath you fancy: modernity brings it to within a few clicks. It's just that integrating the techniques of say, pranayama, into your daily life takes time and attention, and modern life has millions of ways of diverting your time and attention to matters that seem much more urgent or important.
“Civilization: you can't live with it; seven billion people can't live without it.” - Jamie Griffiths
In the midst of a busy lifestyle, creating the space and time needed to develop a more conscious relationship with our breath, with our vital energy, may be difficult at first. But even just a few minutes of practice a day can bring large dividends as unhelpful breathing habits are rewired, deeper states of relaxation become available, held tension starts to melt away and, if you stay open and alert, insights start to emerge about your body, your mind and even the fundamental nature of reality.
In case you are interested in developing such a practice, here is a short exercise that's suitable for complete beginners. It's based on the qigong breathing exercise known as 'Original Breath' but with a few modifications.
Belly Breathing
1. Find a quiet, calm space where you can lie down (either on the floor or on a firm bed) without interruption for 10 minutes. Set a timer so that you don't have to worry about staying too long.
2. Lie on your back with your knees bent and the soles of your feet planted on the floor. It's okay to put cushions under any part of your body that needs support. Be comfortable (but not so much that you'll fall asleep).
3. Place a cushion, book, pencil case or similar object on your belly - something to provide a little downward pressure so that you're more aware of the sensation there. If you don't have anything suitable, just place your hands on your belly, palms facing down. Close your eyes.
4. Bring your attention to your breathing. Notice how your belly expands each time you breathe in and contracts each time you breathe out. If you find this sensation hard to locate, make sure you're breathing through your nose - this promotes use of the diaphragm.
5. Exaggerate this movement of the belly - make the expansive in-breaths more expansive, the contractive out-breaths more contractive. If it helps, imagine that you're breathing in through the belly button, that each breath fills your belly with air like a balloon, and that you are breathing out through your anus. Keep everything smooth, easy, relaxed - don't push yourself. If at any time you feel out of breath or light headed, ease off and let the breath return to normal.
6. Once you've established a nice, slow, easy rhythm, filling the belly with air on each in-breath and emptying it on each out-breath, introduce a pause between each phase of the breath. When your belly is full of air, pause for a second or two before breathing out. When your belly is empty, pause for a second or two before breathing in. Keep everything relaxed and easy, don't push.
NOTE: When you pause, don't hold the breath by closing the throat. Just see if you can suspend the action of breathing without tensing up or closing off, even just for a fraction of a second. If you can't, don't worry about it, it'll come later.
7. If you notice that your attention wanders from the breath, just gently guide it back.
8. To finish the exercise, on your last out-breath completely empty the belly of air by pushing your navel in towards your spine. Get as much of the air out as possible. Then relax and allow your body to resume breathing all by itself. Take a few moments to notice how it feels.
Once you're familiar with this belly breathing, which is re-teaching your body to use the diaphragm and improving your control of it, you can extend this exercise and enhance your relaxation by adding in a further visualisation. This is influenced by Tummo breathing from Tibetan Buddhism (you'll probably need more than 10 minutes for this):
Belly Furnace
Follow steps 1 to 6 as above. Once you've established a solid rhythm with belly breathing, imagine that in your belly is a fire. With each breath in through the belly button, this fire is fed with oxygen and glows with light and heat. The belly fills with smoke. On the out-breath, the smoke is pushed out through the anus. Once this image is established, imagine that as you breathe in and the fire glows hot, tension accumulated in the body is drawn towards it and is burned up, producing the smoke which you then breathe out.
Visit one body part at a time - the top of the head, the face, the neck, the shoulders, the arms, the hands, the feet, the legs, the buttocks, the chest, the back - and imagine any tension you find there being drawn down, down towards the furnace of the belly where it is burned away. Then bring your attention back to the fire in the belly for a few breaths before finishing the exercise as above.
Enjoy the feeling of having been massaged by your own breath.
by Jamie Griffiths, a massage therapist offering holistic, deep-tissue, pregnancy and post-natal treatments both at Healing Space and as a mobile therapist. He is also in training as a pranayama breathwork instructor.