Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

by James Nestor

Here’s the information: To practice Wim Hof’s breathing method,

Conscious heavy breathing, McGee told me, allows us to bend so that we don’t get broken.

“[Tummo] is for the reconstitution of man’s immune system,” Daubard proclaimed. “It’s a fabulous way for the future of man’s health.”

Willingly breathing to the point of exhaustion, they found, could place patients in a state of stress where they could access subconscious and unconscious thoughts.

Holotropic Breathwork

During rest, about 750 milliliters of blood—enough to fill a full wine bottle—flows through the brain every minute.

Whenever the body is forced to take in more air than it needs, we’ll exhale too much carbon dioxide, which will narrow the blood vessels and decrease circulation, especially in the brain.

The areas most affected by this are the brain’s hippocampus and frontal, occipital, and parieto-occipital cortices, which, together, govern functions such as visual processing, body sensory information, memory, the experience of time, and the sense of self.

Disturbances in these areas can elicit powerful hallucinations, which include out-of-body experiences and waking dreams.

Consciously sustaining these stress signals long enough may trick the more primitive limbic system into thinking the body is dying.

The amygdalae help monkeys, humans, and other high-order vertebrates remember, make decisions, and process emotions.

Anxieties were an oversensitivity to perceived fear, be it spiders, the opposite sex, confined spaces, whatever. On a neuronal level, anxieties and phobias were caused by overreactive amygdalae.

The textbooks were wrong. The amygdalae were not the only “alarm circuit of fear.”

It was the deep fear and crushing anxiety that comes from the feeling of not being able to take another breath.

The nagging need to breathe is activated from a cluster of neurons called the central chemoreceptors, located at the base of the brain stem.

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.

The chemoreception that developed passed up through bacteria to more complex life. It’s what stimulates the suffocating feeling you just felt holding your breath.

All these people have trained their chemoreceptors to withstand extreme fluctuations in carbon dioxide without panic.

One text, A Book on Breath by the Master Great Nothing of Sung-Shan, offered this advice:

Sleep apnea, a form of chronic unconscious breathholding, is terribly damaging, as most of us know by now, causing or contributing to hypertension, neurological disorders, autoimmune diseases, and more.

Up to 80 percent of office workers (according to one estimate) suffer from something called continuous partial attention.10 We’ll scan our email, write something down, check Twitter, and do it all over again, never really focusing on any specific task.

In this state of perpetual distraction, breathing becomes shallow and erratic. Sometimes we won’t breathe at all for a half minute or longer.

The breathholding practiced by the ancients and revivalists is conscious. These are practices we will ourselves to do. And when we do them properly, I’d heard they can work wonders.

Breathholding hacks, or, as Feinstein would call them, carbon dioxide therapies, have been around for thousands of years.

All the while, blends of 30 percent carbon dioxide and 70 percent oxygen became a go-to treatment for anxiety, epilepsy, and even schizophrenia.

With a few huffs of the stuff, patients who’d spent months or years in a catatonic state would suddenly come to. They’d open their eyes, look around, and begin calmly talking with doctors and other patients.

Donald Klein, another renowned psychiatrist and expert in panic and anxiety, suggested years later that the gas might help reset the chemoreceptors in the brain, allowing patients to breathe normally so they could think normally.

Pills, he tells me, offer a false promise and do little good for most people.

These drugs have been lifesavers for millions, especially those with severe depression and other serious conditions. But less than half the patients who take them get any benefits.

Feinstein found some inspiring recent studies by Alicia Meuret, the Southern Methodist University psychologist who helped her patients blunt asthma attacks by slowing their breathing to increase their carbon dioxide.25 This technique worked for panic attacks, too.

Meuret crunched the data and found that panic, like asthma, is usually preceded by an increase in breathing volume and rate and a decrease in carbon dioxide.

To stop the attack before it struck, subjects breathed slower and less, increasing their carbon dioxide.

They were interested in exploring the preventative and performance benefits of the gas, in flexing their chemoreceptors even wider so that they could push their bodies further.

After so much heavy breathing and breathholding, Feinstein hypothesized this subject had already flexed his chemoreceptors wide open.

This is, at its core, an exposure therapy. The more I expose myself to this gas, the more resilient I’ll be when I’m overloaded.

It was developed before yoga was even called yoga, before it was an aerobic exercise or had spiritual connotations … at a time when it was a technology of breathing and thinking.

These monks don’t huff and puff. Instead, they sit cross-legged and breathe slow and less, inducing a state of extreme relaxation and calm, reducing their metabolic rates by as much as 64 percent—the lowest number recorded in laboratory experiments.3

The scholars who wrote them clearly knew that breathing is more than just ingesting oxygen, expelling carbon dioxide, and coaxing nervous systems. Our breath also contained another invisible energy, more powerful and affecting than any molecule known to Western science.

prana, which translates to “life force” or “vital energy.” Prana is, basically, an ancient theory of atoms.

The Chinese called it ch’i and believed the body contained channels that functioned like prana power lines connecting organs and tissues.

They created acupuncture to open up prana channels and yoga postures to awaken and distribute the energy.

Spicy foods contained large doses of prana, which is one of the reasons traditional Indian and Chinese diets are often hot.

But the most powerful technique was to inhale pr...

“psychophysiologic self-regulation,” or what would become known as the mind/body connection.

Green wanted to confirm the results with the latest scientific instruments; he wanted to observe the power of prana for himself.

Rama exhaled, calmed himself, lowered his thick eyelids, and then began breathing, carefully controlling the air entering and exiting his body.

In the next experiment, Rama shifted his focus from his brain to his heart.

There was some other strange prana force at play, some more subtle energy Rama had harnessed. Dr. Green and the Menninger team knew it was there; they’d measured its effects on Rama’s body and brain. They just had no way to calculate it with any of their machines.

Rama revealed some of his secrets of prana control in group lessons and videos. He recommended students begin by harmonizing their breathing, by removing the pause between inhalations and exhalations so that every breath was one line connected with no end. When this practice felt comfortable, he instructed them to lengthen the breaths.

Once a day, they were to lie down, 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.

The more easily and often electrons can be transferred between molecules, the more “desaturated” matter becomes, the more alive it is.