2009-05-25 Sunday - Correct Breathing

Everyone breathes, but not everyone breathes correctly.

Shallow breathing is probably one of the underlying causes of many ill health effects (mental and physical).

Practitioners of ancient physical/mental disciplines know this truth intimately.

I was fortunate once to have the opportunity to talk with the great Japanese Shotokan Karate Master, Hidetaka Nishiyama, over breakfast, about correct breathing. His advice: learn to "...breath through your toes". Of course you don't actually breath through your toes, but his words were an attempt to express the sentiment with sufficient strength to indicate how deeply one should endeavour to breath.

There are different breathing techniques for different purposes...

There is the slow rhythmic breathing that stills the mind and brings the mind into harmony with the body during meditation...

There is the deep cleansing breath to purge the body of toxins...

There is the deep cycling breath to build the life-force energy charge (known as qi, ch'i, or ki) of the body for maximum physical exertion...

There is the sharp explosive breath of the Kiai ("spirit shout") - which is used to both marshal the body's total defensive posture to absorb a punishing blow - as well as used to focus all of the vital energies into a single point of attack...aligning the mental, physical, and spiritual forces for the maximum force.

These thoughts about breathing were on my mind yesterday as I sat in a pharmacy - taking my blood pressure.

The initial reading of the systolic pressure was quite high. Subsequent readings were all within a +/- range of only a few points.

Disappointing.

I tried the simplest meditation breathing techniques...but the results were not very encouraging.

Then I remembered the words of Master Nishiyama.

One breath, one life.

A single deep cleansing breath technique.

The new reading?

21 points lower.


When I was in the hospital last year for my emergency surgery, part of the recovery process required using a simple device to exercise my lungs to avoid the risk of fluid accumulation. The nurse remarked on my lung capacity being unusual for someone just out of surgery...and my feeling is that decades of training in breathing techniques was the reason. During the initial admittance examination, I was asked to breath deeply and slowly during an automated MRI scanning process...but the technician had to switch to a manual mode because my breathing pattern was outside of the parameters their software was programmed to recognize for a typical patient.

That and $3.50 will buy you a cup of coffee. hehe.