Breathing is a little like legal content writing. Everyone can do it, but not everyone can do it well. How to breathe better is a lot like learning how to write better. Attention is key.
The idea of learning breathing techniques seems paradoxical. Why bother learning techniques for something that happens automatically and without thinking? Yet, nothing is so easy and complicated as breathing. The very same breathing that happens without thought can also be paced, measured, held, passed through the nose or the mouth, performed slowly, or quickly, greedily gulped, and gently sipped. Good content writing reads as effortlessly and as un-self-consciously as breathing. But make no mistake, writing good legal content that reads so effortlessly requires a free-divers’ kind of discipline.
I have a complicated relationship with breathing. In meditation, I’ve struggled with paying attention to my own breath; my mind wanders away. As a surfer, I’ve had to confront the necessity of being able to hold my breath for extended periods of time when I am held down by undertows. I have trained in CO2 tolerance and breath holding techniques, and have held my breath to the point of pain, watching my mind become desperate as my diaphragm spasms and my blood itself seems to want to drink air. I’ve played with the breath, using rapid breathing to induce altered states of consciousness and have been moved to tears on the floor of a Brooklyn yoga studio while doing breathwork. I’m no stranger to the nuances of breathing. And so when I discovered that James Nestor’s new book Breath offers a kind of guide to various breathing techniques, I grabbed a copy and read with an open mind. I started with curiosity and ended up learning far more about breathing and breathing techniques than I ever imagined.
And so, Breath is best read as a practical guide. After all, few bodily processes are as accessible and as easy to manipulate as breathing. All it takes is a little focus.
Breath opens with a description of how, while practicing pranayama techniques, the author underwent something of a transformation. I decided to try the breathing technique for myself, but found it difficult to penetrate given that Nestor used a practice known as Sudarshan Kriya, a branded and trademarked technique developed by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, a yogic guru whose meditation feats were studied by the Menninger Clinic in the 70s. Today you can buy the full course at The Art of Living, but it will cost you.
Fortunately, there are videos online that take you through the rudimentary paces of Sudarshan Kriya. Nestor warns that only a lesson at the Art of Living can teach the proper technique, but I noticed that the video mentioned the Ujjayi breath, and given that I didn’t have several hundreds of dollars to spare on an online breathing course, I decided to dig a little deeper into the practice myself.
My first real lesson in pranayama, the ancient yogic practice of controlling the breath, was to learn how to perform a proper Ujjayi breath. I didn’t need to look too far to find a helpful video. Adriene, of Yoga with Adriene, devotes a whole video to the technique. In Ujjayi breathing, the inhale occurs through the nose. The ultimate goal with Ujjayi breathing is to extend the exhale.
The first time I combined these techniques, I was house sitting for friends in Kalihi Valley in O’ahu. I live in Waikiki and Kalihi is just up the road, but it might as well be another universe. The tourist district gives way to bodegas and household shrines. As you drive deeper into the valley, the rainforest takes over, and the greenery literally reaches out of the margins of the road and into your car.
My friend’s patio overlooks the valley ridgeline, a spine of mountains that tower over the valley like a ribcage. I sat crossed legged on the outdoor couch, and watched the trees shiver in the wind, each tree like a single cell in the lungs, capturing air, vibrating with life. I watched for a moment, and then shut my eyes, settling into my breath as I assumed the posture the nice Indian man in the video encouraged me to find.
The movement of breath is the movement of energy. Electrons leave the body. Electrons enter it. The body gives its energy out and takes energy in.
It is difficult to explain what happened to me during the meditation. The ineffable is difficult to describe like that. I felt the valley inhale when I inhaled. I felt it exhale when I exhaled. Wind passed through the trees, and entered my body. With my exhale, the wind moved, and the trees moved. All sense of division between my body and the bodies of the plants dissolved. All sense of division between my inhale and exhale and the wind’s movement dissolved.
I had become part of the flow of Kalihi Valley, and by extension, the world and the universe. It was not that I believed I could control the wind, but rather, that I understood that if I could become attuned to the wind and to nature, I could see that I was ultimately not divided from it at all, and part of its rhythms. I understood immediately that if I could somehow live in attunement with these rhythms, everything would work out.
I emerged from the meditation feeling transformed, so transformed that the word transformation is an understatement. Meditation can offer mental clarity, but this was something else. This was something verging on insight. I had a renewed faith that not only might I someday achieve real balance in my life, but that I’d already achieved it. I felt deep compassion and connection with every tree in Kalihi Valley.
Breathing Techniques Reduce PTSD Symptoms
As a legal content writer, I often write about the ways in which PTSD after trauma can affect an individuals’ ability to perform everyday tasks and activities. While there are a range of treatments available to help individuals’ suffering from PTSD, researchers have found that as many as 54 percent of patients drop out before they complete a course of evidence-based treatment. Pharmaceutical and psychotherapeutic treatments show mixed results, and researchers have started to explore alternative treatments which may offer better retention rates and success.
The use of mindfulness, meditation, and breathing techniques in treating PTSD symptoms has not been widely studied. Unlike pharmaceutical interventions, meditation, mindfulness, and breathing is free to do and only requires a few lessons to teach.
In a relatively recent study in the Journal of Traumatic Stress, researchers examined the effects of Sudarshan Kriya breathing techniques in Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans. The researchers found that veterans who were taught Sudarshan Kriya techniques had lower PTSD symptom scores than those who had not learned the technique.
The researchers explained that they selected Sudarshan Kriya because there were other studies that showed that the technique had reduced PTSD symptoms in tsunami survivors, as well as reducing self-reported anxiety and depression.
The Benefits of Certain Breathing Techniques
Is it possible to change your mind by changing your breath? James Nestor offers compelling evidence that it is not only possible to change your mind by changing the way you breathe, but that you can also change your mood, your heart rate, your metabolism, and more by using certain breathing techniques. You can increase athletic performance. Nestor writes about researchers who have found that by fully emptying the lungs, we can increase our lung capacity and cardiovascular efficiency.
Slower breathing can increase carbon dioxide buildup in our bodies. We tend to think of carbon dioxide as the gas we want to get rid of when we exhale, but carbon dioxide is actually important. Carbon dioxide acts like a magnet in the body, drawing oxygen toward it wherever it is. As our muscles build up carbon dioxide, they draw more oxygen to them, the reason why when we work out, our bodies are efficient at delivering oxygen to the muscles where oxygen is most needed.
Nestor takes his readers on a tour of deep human history, revealing why humans suck at breathing (after the farming revolution, humans started to eat soft processed food that caused our mandibles to atrophy), and why our teeth are so crooked (“our ancient ancestors chewed for hours a day, every day. And because they chewed so much, their mouths, teeth, throats, and faces grew to be wide.”). He explains that breathing through the nose is healthier than mouth breathing, and even puts himself through a miserable experiment where he forces himself to breathe only through the mouth for a week and a half. (The results are terrible: Nestor’s blood pressure goes up, his heart rate variability declines, his mental clarity turns to fog, he suffers from insomnia, he begins to suffer from sleep apnea, and he generally feels like crap.) This is perhaps something to think about if you suffer a broken nose.
When Nestor begins breathing through his nose, his blood pressure drops, his heart rate variability increases by more than 150%, his sleep apnea goes away, and he feels much better. Nose breathing is important, Nestor explains, because the nostrils warm the air and remove dust and other impurities that can get us sick. The nostrils also pressurize the air, so that when the air gets to our lungs, they can “extract more oxygen with each breath.”
Nose breathing has been practiced and promoted for its life-affirming and health-affirming effects by ancient cultures and civilizations. Native American cultures including the Lakota Sioux and the civilizations along the Mississippi trained their children to breathe through their noses from infancy. For these cultures, breath through the nose was medicine. In yogic traditions, nose breathing was also important, as I’d soon learn as I ventured deeper into breathing meditations.
Breathing Techniques: An Ongoing Practice
Like any practice, breathing seems to have its weekend warriors, content to learn a couple of styles and practice them weekly in a group or during a short daily meditation practice. For those wishing to go deeper, there is a wealth of knowledge and breathing techniques available in Nestor’s book.
Breathing well can even have psychological benefits. My therapist tells me to take a deep breath whenever I feel anxious.
I admit I didn’t come to Nestor’s Breath as a complete novice. I had already trained in many of the breathing techniques he offers. It was nice to find a book that gathered them all together in one place.
As I played with the breath further, I found myself exploring its limits and possibilities and making discoveries of my own. If I incorporated an “om” into my exhale, strange things happened to my mind and body if I extended the exhale along with the vocalization, and if I emptied my lungs fully before holding my breath, I could draw my body and mind into an altered state during an extended inhale. If I practiced gratitude while holding my breath, my breath hold could last longer. In many ways, the breathing techniques in Nestor’s Breath are a primer. A little curiosity and experimentation also goes a long way when it comes to learning about the limits and potential of the breath.
Nestor’s book brings in the idea of play to breathing, turning something so essential and overlooked into an area worthy of deeper inquiry.
As a writer, I try to bring an element of play into everything I do, exploring new avenues and paths as I go along. Effortless writing, like effortless breathing, is perhaps not so effortless at all.
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.