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This process should take several months or years to master. Modern breathers like me can try to hack this process and speed it up. But we will fail. Hallucinations, howling, soiling one’s clothes: none of that was supposed to happen.
The key to Sudarshan Kriya, Tummo, or any other breathing practice rooted in ancient yoga is to learn to be patient, maintain flexibility, and slowly absorb what breathing has to offer.
Pinheiro has offered to teach me some of the ancient Yôga breathing techniques DeRose is known for.
I take a seat across from him. A minute later, we begin to breathe. We start with jiya pranayama, which involves curling the tongue to the back of the mouth and holding the breath. We run through some bhandas, a method of redirecting and holding prana inside the body by contracting muscles in the throat, abs, and other areas. Then I lie down in front of him so that I’m looking up at the white acoustic tiles on the ceiling.
“Concentrate on just one fluid movement from inhale to exhale,” says Pinheiro.
I relax my throat and take a very deep inhale into the pit of my stomach, then exhale completely. Inhale again, and repeat. “All the way in and all the way out,” says Pinheiro. “Keep going! Keep breathing!” • • • There it is, again. And here I am, again. That ringing in the ears. The heavy-metal double-bass drum thumping in my chest. The warm static flowing to my shoulders and face. The wave comes, washes over and runs up, then turns around and recedes, back to the ocean.
As I breathe a little faster, go a little deeper, the names of all the techniques I’ve explored over the past ten years all come back in a rush. Pranayama. Buteyko. Coherent Breathing. Hypoventilation. Breathing Coordination. Holotropic Breathwork. Adhama. Madhyama. Uttama. Kêvala. Embryonic Breath. Harmonizing Breath. The Breath by the Master Great Nothing. Tummo. Sudarshan Kriya.
They give us the means to stretch our lungs and straighten our bodies, boost blood flow, balance our minds and moods, and excite the electrons in our molecules. To sleep better, run faster, swim deeper, live longer, and evolve further. They offer a mystery and magic of life that unfolds a little more with every new breath we take.
It’s been ten years since I came to this room and felt the possibilities of breathing. A decade of traveling, research, and self-experimentation. In that time I’ve learned that the benefits of breathing are vast, at times unfathomable. But they’re also limited. This became disturbingly clear several months ago.
What I explained to each of these people, and what I’d like to make clear now, is that breathing, like any therapy or medication, can’t do everything. Breathing fast, slow, or not at all can’t make an embolism go away. Breathing through the nose with a big exhale can’t reverse the onset of neuromuscular genetic diseases. No breathing can heal stage IV cancer. These severe problems require urgent medical attention.
Like all Eastern medicines, breathing techniques are best suited to serve as preventative maintenance, a way to retain balance in the body so that milder problems don’t blossom into more serious health issues.
Nine out of ten of the top killers, such as diabetes, heart disease, and stroke are caused by the food we eat, water we drink, houses we live in, and offices we work in. They are diseases humanity created. While some of us may be genetically predisposed toward one disease or another, that doesn’t mean we’re predestined to get these conditions. Genes can be turned off just as they can be turned on.
Improving diet and exercise and removing toxins and stressors from the home and workplace have a profound and lasting effect on the prevention and treatment of the majority of modern, chronic diseases. Breathing is a key input.
Breathing is a missing pillar of health. “If I had to limit my advice on healthier living to just one tip, it would be simply to learn how to breathe better,” wrote Andrew Weil, the famed doctor.
The day Olsson and I removed the plugs and tape, our blood pressure dropped, carbon dioxide levels rose, and heart rates normalized. Snoring decreased nine-fold from the mouthbreathing phase, from several hours a night to a few minutes. Within two days, neither of us was snoring at all. The bacterial infection in my nose quickly cleared up without treatment. Olsson and I had cured ourselves by breathing through our noses.
As basic as this sounds, full exhalations are seldom practiced. Most of us engage only a small fraction of our total lung capacity with each breath, requiring us to do more and get less. One of the first steps in healthy breathing is to extend these breaths, to move the diaphragm up and down a bit more, and to get air out of us before taking a new one in.
The bones in the human face don’t stop growing in our 20s, unlike other bones in the body. They can expand and remodel into our 70s, and likely beyond. Which means we can influence the size and shape of our mouths and improve our ability to breathe at virtually any age.
Your diet should consist of the rougher, rawer, and heartier foods our great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers ate. The kinds of foods that required an hour or two a day of hard chewing.
techniques like Tummo, Sudarshan Kriya, and vigorous pranayamas do. They stress the body on purpose, snapping it out of its funk so that it can properly function during the other 23½ hours a day. Conscious heavy breathing teaches us to be the pilots of our autonomic nervous systems and our bodies, not the passengers.
The perfect breath is this: Breathe in for about 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. There is no such thing as having too much peak efficiency in your body.
Google just released an app that pops up automatically when the words “breathing exercise” are searched. It trains visitors to inhale and exhale every 5.5 seconds.
