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by
James Nestor
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April 10, 2021 - January 24, 2022
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.
“In every culture and in every medical tradition before ours, healing was accomplished by moving energy,”
The moving energy of electrons allows living things to stay alive and healthy for as long as possible.
The Indus Valley was the birthplace of yoga.
The Aryans took the Indus-Sarasvati culture and codified, condensed, and rewrote it in their native language of Sanskrit.
It’s from these Sanskrit translations that we get the Vedas, religious and mystical texts that contain the earliest known documentation of the word “yoga.”
There is no mention in the Yoga Sutras of moving between or even repeating poses. The Sanskrit word asana originally meant “seat” and “posture.” It referred both to the act of sitting and the material you sit on. What it specifically did not mean was to stand up and move about.
The earliest yoga was a science of holding still and building prana through breathing.
He tells me that only in the twentieth century would yoga poses be combined and repeated into a kind of aerobic dance called “vinyasa flow.”
Yôga practices were never designed to cure problems, he tells me. They were created for healthy people to climb the next rung of potential: to give them the conscious power to heat themselves on command, expand their consciousness, control their nervous systems and hearts, and live longer and more vibrant lives.
The kriya I’d experienced was developed in the 1980s by a man named Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and is now practiced by tens of millions of people around the world through The Art of Living Foundation.
It does much of what Tummo does because, DeRose says, both were designed from the same ancient practices.fn1
Ancient yogis spent thousands of years honing pranayama techniques, specifically to control this energy and distribute it throughout the body to provoke their “good visions,” toned down a notch or two. This process should take several months or years to master.
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.
Modern medicine, they said, was amazingly efficient at cutting out and stitching up parts of the body in emergencies, but sadly deficient at treating milder, chronic systemic maladies—the asthma, headaches, stress, and autoimmune issues that most of the modern population contends with.
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.
“If I had to limit my advice on healthier living to just one tip, it would be simply to learn how to breathe better,”
SHUT YOUR MOUTH
BREATHE THROUGH YOUR NOSE
EXHALE
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.
CHEW
great-great-great-great-grandmothers ate.8 The kinds of foods that required an hour or two a day of hard chewing. And in the meantime, lips together, teeth slightly touching, and tongue on the roof of the mouth.
BREATHE MORE, ON OCCASION
Conscious heavy breathing teaches us to be the pilots of our autonomic nervous systems and our bodies, not the passengers.
HOLD YOUR BREATH
“What anxious patients could be experiencing is a completely natural reaction—they’re reacting to an emergency in their bodies,” said Feinstein. “It could be that anxiety, at its root, isn’t a psychological problem at all.”
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.
Grilling food: For instance, animals can use only 50 to 60 percent of the nutrients from a raw egg but more than 90 percent from a cooked egg. The same is true with many cooked plants, vegetables, and meats. Steven Lin, The Dental Diet: The Surprising Link between Your Teeth, Real Food, and Life-Changing Natural Health (Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, 2018), 35.
saved even more energy: How much brain did we gain from a smaller gut? Nobody really knows for sure, but it’s significant. An exhaustive overview is available in Leslie C. Aiello, “Brains and Guts in Human Evolution: The Expensive Tissue Hypothesis,” Mar. 1997, http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0100-84551997000100023.
into a state of stress: This blog entry includes a thorough explanation with 43 scientific references: “The Nose Knows: A Case for Nasal Breathing During High Intensity Exercise,” Adam Cap website, https://adamcap.com/2013/11/29/the-nose-knows/
swore off breathing through their mouths: More explanation from Douillard on the importance of nasal breathing in exercise: “Ayurvedic Fitness,” John Douillard, PTonthenet, Jan. 3, 2007, https://www.ptonthenet.com/articles/Ayurvedic-Fitness-2783.
body doesn’t have enough oxygen: A good, simple explanation of anaerobic and aerobic energies: Andrea Boldt, “What Is the Difference Between Lactic Acid & Lactate?,” https://www.livestrong.com/article/470283-what-is-the-difference-between-lactic-acid-lactate/.
an excess of lactic acid: Stephen M. Roth, “Why Does Lactic Acid Build Up in Muscles? And Why Does It Cause Soreness?,” Scientific American, Jan. 23, 2006, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-does-lactic-acid-buil/.
anaerobic muscle fibers: Human muscle fibers are an interwoven mixture of aerobic and anaerobic fibers, whereas other animals, such as chickens, have entire muscle systems that are either aerobic or anaerobic. The dark meat in a cooked chicken is dark because these muscles were used to provide aerobic energy and are filled with oxygenated blood; white meat is anaerobic, and so is lacking in these red pigments. Phillip Maffetone, The Maffetone Method: The Holistic, Low-Stress, No-Pain Way to Exceptional Fitness (Camden, ME: Ragged Mountain Press/McGraw-Hill, 1999), 21.
standardized workouts could be more injurious: To be clear, Maffetone never argued against occasionally entering into anaerobic exercise. Rowing, lifting weights, and running can all have a profound effect on strength and endurance. But to be effective, these exercises needed to be kept in context of larger training, and can’t be prioritized over aerobic training. High-intensity interval training only works because well-designed programs are built around spending the vast majority of time in periods of slower, gentler aerobic exercise. Author and fitness trainer Brian MacKenzie argues that the
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subtract your age from 180: Those with heart disease or other medical conditions should subtract 10 from Maffetone’s equation; if you have asthma or allergies or have not exercised before, subtract 5. Competitive athletes who have been training for more than two years, add 5. This works out to around 80 percent of maximum capacity for a man of my age. Anaerobic states usually hit at 80 percent, or the stage at which it becomes difficult to speak in full sentences. “Know Your Target Heart Rates for Exercise, Losing Weight and Health,” Heart.org,
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below this rate but never above it: Two thousand years ago, a Chinese surgeon named Hua Tuo prescribed only moderate exercise to his patients, warning them: “The body needs exercise, only it must not be to the point of exhaustion, for exercise expels the bad air in the system, promotes free circulation of the blood, and prevents sickness.” The most efficient state of exercise where we reap the most benefits, Maffetone found, was around or below 60 percent of maximum capacity. The Cooper Institute, a research foundation that for 50 years has been studying the links between physical activity and
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Patrick McKeown: Patrick McKeown and Martha Macaluso, “Mouth Breathing: Physical, Mental and Emotional Consequences,” Central Jersey Dental Sleep Medicine, Mar. 9, 2017, https://sleep-apnea-dentist-nj.info/mouth-breathing-physical-mental-and-emotional-consequences/
When seasonal allergies hit: W. T. McNicholas, “The Nose and OSA: Variable Nasal Obstruction May Be More Important in Pathophysiology Than Fixed Obstruction,” European Respiratory Journal 32 (2008): 5, https://erj.ersjournals.com/content/32/1/3; C. R. Canova et al., “Increased Prevalence of Perennial Allergic Rhinitis in Patients with Obstructive Sleep Apnea,” Respiration 71 (Mar.–Apr. 2004): 138–43; Carlos Torre and Christian Guilleminault, “Establishment of Nasal Breathing Should Be the Ultimate Goal to Secure Adequate Craniofacial and Airway Development in Children,” Jornal de Pediatria 94,
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obstructive sleep apnea: Sleep apnea and snoring are common bedfellows. The more and louder we snore, the more the airways become damaged and the more susceptible we are to sleep apnea. Farhan Shah et al., “Desmin and Dystrophin Abnormalities in Upper Airway Muscles of Snorers and Patients with Sleep Apnea,” Respiratory Research 20, no. 1 (Dec. 2019): 31.
lose 40 percent more water: Sophie Svensson et al., “Increased Net Water Loss by Oral Compared to Nasal Expiration in Healthy Subjects,” Rhinology 44, no. 1 (Mar. 2006): 74–77.
report from the Mayo Clinic:
Insomnia and sleeping with obstructive breath
The breath inhaled: The Primordial Breath: An Ancient Chinese Way of Prolonging Life through Breath Control, vol. 2, trans. Jane Huang and Michael Wurmbrand (Original Books, 1990), 31.
Smell is life’s oldest sense: Interview with Dolores Malaspina, MD, professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University in New York; Nancie George, “10 Incredible Facts about Your Sense of Smell,” EveryDay Health, https://www.everydayhealth.com/news/incredible-facts-about-your-sense-smell/.
body to flip over: In addition, nasal cycles appear to be associated with the duration of deep sleep.
all the grains: All the world’s beaches contain somewhere in the neighborhood of 2.5 to 10 sextillion grains of sand. Meanwhile, that breath of air you just inhaled contains around 25 sextillion molecules.
Additionally, the increased air resistance through nasal breathing increases the vacuum in the lungs, and helps us draw in 20 percent more oxygen than through the mouth.
Sleep tape has its critics. A Guardian newspaper story from July 2019 claimed that sleep taping was dangerous because “if you started vomiting there would be a good chance you would choke.” This claim, Burhenne and Kearney told me, is as ridiculous as it is unfounded and under-researched.
lung-expanding stretches: The directions I followed were on Wikipedia, “Five Tibetan Rites.” Cardiologist Joel Kahn suggests performing each rite for 21 rounds, as the ancient Tibetans did. For beginners, ten minutes a day for all the exercises is a good starting point.
