Healing Through Breathing

And how I realized I'm not a writer

The beginning of my new audiobook, Healing Through Breathing, starts with a thought about the fact that breath is life, something that we all know. But what is life? It’s not simply being physiologically alive, it’s the human experience, with all its wonderment and sorrow, that we call life, that we call living. The way we breathe throughout our lives can radically alter our experience of life.

P.Y. Deshpande, in his wonderful book Authentic Yoga, Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, provides a wonderful insight into breath. Sutra 1.34 suggests a practice where we exhale and hold our breath out, pausing, and we can also inhale and hold our breath in. It is not a pranayama practice, but a simple breath observation practice. He says, ever so beautifully:

“If one is passionately interested in living, a time may come when breathing, a correlate of living, may excite one’s passionate interest in it… It would demand total attention and involve the totality of one’s mind, as much as passionate interest in living involves the totality of one’s being.”

Here, the pursuit of yoga is not opposed to engaging in the world, of denying the world or becoming detached from it, but becoming fully, completely, and irrevocably fascinated by life, breath, and the nature of the world.

When we become fascinated in the observation of our breath, fully observant and aware of it, it is not us who are breathing; breathing is simply happening. We are not being aware, awareness is simply happening. This brings us out from a fragmented subject-object split, and in those moments are in an altogether new, expanded state, which is ever anew in each moment.

If I had read his book two months ago, I definitely would have quoted him.

Healing Through Breathing was written with an audience in mind who are new to breathing practices. It was an interesting experiment because I am used to long, complicated explanations and examinations of everything from the nervous system to Yoga texts. My first draft was precisely that, long, rambling, and complex. My editor, Stacy, reigned me in and asked that I write it as if I was teaching a class on breathing. So, I dove back in, and what I turned in was more or less a two-and-a-half-hour lecture plus a four-part breathing class. The practices included in the audio are all based on slow-breathing practices, which have both subtle and profound results attributed to them. The breathing practices are woven into science, spirituality, and history and can be heard on Audible.

I had an interesting realization while recording the audio. The sound engineers said to me, at the end of our one day of six hours of recording, that they were impressed with how easily I read all of the scientific terms, and smoothly went through the text without many mistakes (I made eight, to be precise, in 96 pages). I said, spontaneously, that I thought it was because I was a teacher and not a writer, so I was used to saying all of these things out loud, but that I wasn’t a writer who knew how to write stuff properly and put commas in the right place (just ask Jeff Seroy). This realization made me feel pretty free—that to write things down, you don’t need to be a writer, you just need to have the desire to be a communicator. I think this is going to open up a whole new world for me in the act of writing—to not try to be a writer, but simply communicate and share what is in my head.

Here are a couple of excerpts from the audio for you—head over to Audible to hear the whole thing!

From Chapter 1

“For one thing to fill another, one substance to fill an empty vessel, such as air to fill a lung, there is a shift of the substance in location and space, meaning air must move from where it is to where we need it to be, namely, in our lungs, so we can breathe and live. Have you ever heard the phrase, “nature abhors a vacuum”? This is very much what happens with our lungs. When they are in an empty state, they are like a vacuum, and the atmospheric pressure is primed to push air into us. Our lungs are a low-pressure system when empty. The atmosphere around us is a high-pressure system. Imagine, for example, the force of gravity, which keeps us on earth, and prevents us from floating off into space. That same force of gravity is present in air pressure, and there is a constant give and take, ebb and flow, between the pressure system outside of us and the pressure system within our lungs. We are being breathed by the atmosphere all through the day, all through our lives. To acknowledge that we are being breathed all through our lives is an interesting prospect, which can allow us to practice surrender and trust. It’s reflective of a much larger principle in our lives, and that is the ability or willingness to let go of control, accept the unknown, and allow nature to hold us. In that trust, in that acceptance, there can be found great peace and relaxation that we are ok.”

From Chapter 3:

“Stress adaptation describes how our neuroendocrine system responds to stressful situations in life. There are two basic ways that this happens. The first is called “stress without distress,” which is ruled by the somatotropic axis, where the limbic system is activated as a coping mechanism. The anatomical and chemical pathway is as follows: the prime memory center of the brain, the hippocampus, signals the hypothalamus, the master gland of the endocrine system, that learning is occurring. The hypothalamus signals the pituitary to release a hormone called somatotropin releasing factor, which in turn releases somatotropic growth factor. This is a tremendously beneficial substance for the brain which encourages not only our learning but the absorption of that learning into the memory centers and initiates a signaling pattern called “effort without distress,” which is positive stress.  We can activate positive stress through learned behavior, that is, reframing stress as a growth experience. Positive stress helps us to grow, learn, rise to a challenge, and be motivated to accept challenges to learn new skills, fulfill purpose in our lives, and be adaptable to change. We develop the ability to cognize situations in life realistically, or with a positive or growth mindset. Slow breathing supports this pathway because when we take control of the pace of our breathing, or simply observe our breath, we can bypass the flare-ups of the limbic system that can hijack our emotional responses to things that are often really not life-threatening, or even that stressful. Slow breathing is, in fact, a type of positive stress in and of itself, because you are making an autonomic function of your body intentional, and so your nervous system will respond by creating new pathways of information that allow you to step into the driver’s seat more readily and easily when needed. It causes positive stress because sometimes, as you might notice, your nervous system might resist a little to the changes you are suggesting because it is not used to being told what to do. So when you take over, there can be some internal tension that will melt away with time, practice, patience, and a gentle approach to slow breathing.”

Cover art by Francesco Clemente