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No matter what we eat, how much we exercise, how resilient our genes are, how skinny or young or wise we are—none of it will matter unless we’re breathing correctly.
The Native Americans explained to Catlin that breath inhaled through the mouth sapped the body of strength, deformed the face, and caused stress and disease. On the other hand, breath inhaled through the nose kept the body strong, made the face beautiful, and prevented disease.
When the nose is denied regular use, it will atrophy.
Keeping the nose constantly in use, however, trains the tissues inside the nasal cavity and throat to flex and stay open.
so many of their patients healed themselves this way: by breathing from their noses, all day and all night.
How to apply mouth tape, or “sleep tape” as it’s also called, is a matter of personal preference, and everyone I t...
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3M Nexcare Durapore “durable cloth” tape, an all-purpose surgical tape with a gentle adhesive.
Catlin’s Breath of Life,
Just a few minutes of daily bending and breathing can expand lung capacity. With that extra capacity we can expand our lives.
The stretches, called the Five Tibetan Rites,
Any regular practice that stretches the lungs and keeps them flexible can retain or increase lung capacity.
the most important aspect of breathing wasn’t just to take in air through the nose. Inhaling was the easy part. The key to breathing, lung expansion, and the long life that came with it was on the other end of respiration. It was in the transformative power of a full exhalation.
The lungs are the weight-regulating system of the body.
What our bodies really want, what they require to function properly, isn’t faster or deeper breaths. It’s not more air. What we need is more carbon dioxide.
breathing was like rowing a boat: taking a zillion short and stilted strokes will get you where you’re going, but they pale in comparison to the efficiency and speed of fewer, longer strokes.
The deeper and more softly we breathe in, and the longer we exhale, the more slowly the heart beats and the calmer we become.
Conscious heavy breathing, McGee told me, allows us to bend so that we don’t get broken.
When we’re breathing too slowly and carbon dioxide levels rise, the central chemoreceptors monitor these changes and send alarm signals to the brain, telling our lungs to breathe faster and more deeply. When we’re breathing too quickly, these chemoreceptors direct the body to breathe more slowly to increase carbon dioxide levels. This is how our bodies determine how fast and often we breathe, not by the amount of oxygen, but by the level of carbon dioxide.
Swami Rama’s “superhuman” abilities
take a brief inhale, and then exhale to a count of 6. As they progressed, they could inhale to a count of 4 and exhale to 8, with the goal of reaching a half-minute exhale after six months of practice.19 Upon reaching this 30 count, Rama promised his students, they “will not have any toxins and will be disease-free.”
Breathing slow, less, and through the nose balances the levels of respiratory gases in the body and sends the maximum amount of oxygen to the maximum amount of tissues so that our cells have the maximum amount of electron reactivity.
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.
