How you breathe is how you live
I was teaching Yoga in Cyprus when my friend Peter, who runs Vedanta Yoga Centre in Limassol, told me about the breathwork he had been doing.
If you know me you will know one of my attributes is scepticism. I never just believe the stories I hear, I have to see it, hear it, taste it, feel it or smell it before I agree. However once something has stood up to my tests of reason, once I have a direct experience and once it has shown its value, I do live up to it, espouse it and promote it. It becomes a value in my life.
Breathwork is a rich part of this experience and core to my own practice. Why? What does breathing well give us?
Freedom, arising through the conscious connectivity of internal and external. Flow.
Breathing well brings air through the nose and under the emotional brain bringing calm positivity. Breathing well can also shift our brain state from over busy to calm and tranquil.
And that is before we get into the wilder forms of breathwork that can boost the immune system, give greater control of the brain and take us into altered states and peak experiences.
This is true of the conscious connected breathing taught by Viola and Michael Edward de Glanville.
Peter drove me up to their house in Kyrenia in Northern Cyprus which was a ride through the checkpoint which still stands as a marker to the chequered history of Turkish-Greek relationships, and a reminder of the importance of the work we are all undertaking, building connection.
After a brief intro to the group for whom I was going to be a guinea pig, I laid down on my back and did as I was told in terms of breathing.
I began a deep journey.
To take a few steps back on my path…
I was initiated into breath work practices 35 years ago by my first yoga teacher Swami Pragyamurti. She gave me a Tantric practice of watching the breath. This is meant to be done 24hrs a day. It has taken years for me to master and now conscious breath is normal. This is where there is the presence of awareness for the whole process of the breath, how it is and how it feels, and also the connections between the in breath and out breath. This is now normal breathing for me. I can’t claim to be aware of my breath in my sleep all the time, but there are times when even this happens. She told me this was a practice from Abhinavagupta the great Kashmiri Shaivist teacher, that she was given by her teacher.
The natural Mantra of life is the breath with its different quality, feeling and sound to the inhale and exhale.
The second level to this was to weave simple Mantras of devotion, celebration, gratitude and joy into the breath. This is also now normal.
Mantra means mind liberation. The whole universe is vibration and Mantra and breath leads us as awareness beings into this vibrational web. Here we find ourselves as no longer feeling separate or solid but deeply connected to everything. We know ourselves as the cosmos, it’s vastness, power and creative force.
The other key practices I have worked with over the past thirty years include Nadi Shodhana, Anuloma Viloma, Ujjayi, Surya Bhedana, Brahmari and Bhastrika Pranayama. I’ve also worked with the teachings of Gitananda through Philip Xerri that are useful preparations for accessing deeper breath work.
The last key practice I have worked with is the breath and Mantra combination of Maha Yoga. Maha Yoga works with our deep centre line of awareness, breath, breath holding and Mantra.
As a biologist, I look at the scientific correlates of all these practices and the increasing scientific support for various practices of breath work and Mantra that are all being explored a bit more fully. There is a long way to go with these kinds of empirical inquiries and I feel the world would benefit if we spent more money on quality research in this key area of life. The reported benefits include the obvious such as lower levels of stress response and reduction of inflammatory response. It includes interiorisation and interoceptive capacity. It includes regrowth of the telomeres, the end cap on chromosomes.
However, the key quality of breathwork is how it liberates us from the biological illusion of being a separate, defined, solid, real and permanent lump in space-time. It brings us home to the reality of relational interdependence that life is. It slowly and inexorably lands us home in the creative genius and wild playfulness that we all really are. It reconnects us to the seamless Web of totality where we find true freedom. In this sense, it liberates us from consumption-oriented behaviours and lands us in contentment, peace and ecological sanity!
So what did I find in Cyprus
It was beyond words, they are useless symbolic markers to even begin to define or describe the geometry, the poetry, the ocean of bliss and awareness and luminosity that I found in my own beingness. It was what all the yoga I had done had been talking about.
For sure, I’ve had lots of powerful experiences that have blown away the walls of separation. That’s the base from which I teach. You can read about these if you choose in my book The Stream.
But, this was the business. In fifty minutes of conscious connected breathing, I found all those experiences, all those altered states and the greatest bliss I have ever felt.
Not only that but I could take time afterwards to go into integration to really land the satori.
This is where the juice is. One of the keys I have found is simply that this oceanic bliss-awareness-pure being state ripples through every moment of every day. Yet we have to actually experience this to know it. We then have to integrate it. integration is the second key.
Viola and Michaels’s work unite the breath practice with awareness of the creation of all our limiting beliefs and core wounds so that the practice can clear these out of the way. This work allows for the crucial wing of integration.
Many people who come do not immediately find bliss and cosmic orgasm, they find old memories, deep trauma and emotional wounds that surface to be resolved. The breath takes us deep into these difficult places and clears them for us to live healthier, more successful, more loving lives. As part of a synergy of approaches to personal and transpersonal freedom, along with meditation, breathwork is invaluable. And these profound states of bliss, peace and a knowingness of what is sacred are available to us all. This is the sweet democracy of practice.
Anyway — there I was, on a tailor-made training with these fab people who I now consider to be dear friends. I am working hard on an intense training so I can bring these practices into the world. Remember, the key to these profound experiences is the work, the integration that follows.
I am already highly trained in many modalities, modalities that work with the body such as yoga, dance, martial arts, structural bodywork and shiatsu, methods that work with heart and mind such as mindfulness and compassion therapy, meditation, clinical hypnotherapy, NLP and psychotherapy. And, to add this string to my bow is a beautiful gift.
I assure there will be more I can share of this profound work in due course of time. I look forward to sharing with you.
You can find out more about Viola, Michael and their work at Kayana on www.violaedward.com.
Now the key is the integration and daily habits
I express to you my recent journeys with new breathing practices. You may now ask why breathing is so important in your daily life.
Paying attention to the breath brings us directly into contact with our mind. Its narratives and meaning-making become more and more apparent as we cultivate the power of focus and build our experience of the observing self. We notice the effect of our mental activity on the breath and the breath on our mental activity. As this occurs we notice the effect of the breath and mind on our energy levels and how we experience what we can call our life-force.
There are 3 essential systems that interact with that life-force.
All the fluids in the body flow in relationship to three pumps, the heart, muscular action and the breath. The negative pressure in the chest at the initiation of an inhale sucks blood and lymphatic fluid back into the chest from the periphery. The breath enables cerebrospinal fluid flow around the nervous system making that more effective.
Your daily habits and routines will affect how you breath
So, breathing well is so important. But your standard behaviours and habits tomorrow will likely make this impossible. Firstly breathing well is not possible if the spine is flexed from chair sitting if muscles such as the psoas major and quadratus lumborum are short, tight or imbalanced as they pull through the fascia on the major breathing muscles the diaphragm. If the diaphragm has been used for controlling unwanted emotions then again breathing well is not possible. There are many other anatomical, structural and physiological limitations to quality breathing, most of them resolvable through an intelligent somatic practice. I offer you some of the solutions to this in the Mind Mastery course.
Tomorrow, take 10 minutes to pay attention to your breath. Reflect. Then repeat daily.
These practices take years to develop properly and so many young relatively untrained teachers are trying to ride this new wave of ‘breath’ and present themselves as experts in a field they don’t really understand. Such is the modern world of market power. Please question everything your find.
For greater awareness of breath work reach out to me here, begin with our Mind Mastery course which delivers several of the practices I utilise and subscribe to get more practices to your inbox
