Re-learning to breath correctly is going back to what we know already and knew when we were born. So without anyone telling us, training us, assisting us, or examining us, we came into life knowing the most important lesson that anyone has to learn, which is to breathe correctly. As Karen Roon says in her book The New Way to Relax, “a newborn baby is a perfect instructor in breathing and relaxation”. The reason is that a newborn baby, particularly when the birth is natural and uncomplicated, allows the whole of its lungs to be used for breathing from the bottom to the top of the lungs, which is the perfect blue print, or pattern, which we also have encoded within our brain.
Correct breathing is not necessarily deep breathing, nor is it a technique. Many people of all professions particularly even health professions will pull in the stomach and expand the chest when called upon to deep breathe. Deep breathing is a science taught in warfare, so that when we deep breathe we put ourselves into a state of tension ready to kill or escape.
Correct breathing allows us to refrain from killing or feel the need to escape because we are able to deal with any situation that arises in a state of calmness.
Correct breathing allows us to counsel ourselves, because deep within everyone we already know the answer to our own problems. Although we may share conversations about problems with other people they cannot really counsel us in how to solve the problem, because only we know the answer! Of course we may be afraid to listen to the answer or carry out the appropriate actions, but sooner or later, after we learn correct breathing, we find the courage to carry out right action and notice how our lives improve. This courage sometimes requires us to change relationships, our work, our home, in fact anything which we have created, which is not correct to our own unique blue print because none of these will work out to our satisfaction and whether we acknowledge it or not, deep within us all there is a sense of dis-ease. Eventually this also leads to disease in the form of physical affliction, mental stress and a perpetual state of worry, which can lead to emotional illness.
Correct breathing allows us to feed the brain, which is our central functioning motor, with the forty percent plus of oxygen it needs, even though it only weighs between three and a half to five and a half pounds approximately. It is quite startling to think that the brain needs almost half the oxygen we take in, yet weighs so little compared with the rest of the body, but of course the function of thinking requires enormous energy in order that the body can carry out what the brain tells it to do.
They say that “when our vocation is also our vacation” we discover the secret of life or “when our work is our play” we discover the secret of life! Unfortunately a lot of our educational priorities result in many people missing the point of being given life because our life ends up in a vocation becoming a form of prison and we forget how to play.
Re-remembering how to breathe correctly can take a long time dependent on how far and for how long our correct breathing pattern has become abnormal. Young people or children put themselves right much more easily because they are nearer to nature. Correct breathing cleanses the body of toxins, restores correct circulation and cell regeneration, surely the most important preventative action we need to take in avoiding cancer. We doubt if any of the hundreds of millions of pounds spent on cancer research involves re-teaching people how to breathe correctly for cancer prevention or to avoid a fresh outbreak of the disease. Of course medical researchers need to be able to breathe correctly themselves, I’ve yet to meet one who does!
The symptom of in-correct breathing applies to virtually any disease we can think of including mental illness. Reverse the breathing limitations and you reverse the illness.
You cannot teach correct breathing unless your breathe correctly yourself, so the re-teaching process is a vital aspect when you choose a teacher, you have to be prepared to go through a certain of amount of healing yourself to become a breathing teacher but it is worth the effort. Karen Roon also said, “there is no habit in life which pays bigger dividends or pays them more promptly than complete breathing, it’s the source of your life, your health, your cheerful spirit, your energy and your relaxation” – what more can we want? Unfortunately good breathing teachers are as scarce as gold dust in our health professions.
The ancient name for breath is spirit, so as we heal our breathing we also heal our spirit. A retiring President of the Royal College of Psychiatry suggested that doctors or psychiatrists should take note of the spiritual dimension. Perhaps if they did there would be less medication. To breathe correctly we have to breathe up and down through the nose, this itself takes quite a lot of time to re-learn if we have not been using the nose, and instead use the mouth. Yet people are still being taught to breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth, it is incorrect. A famous yoga teacher once said, “mouth breathing is the most disgusting form of breathing known to man!”
When we really learn how to breathe correctly we balance the two hemispheres of the brain i.e. the logical and creative which allows all our actions to be harmonious and ourselves full of confidence. The brain pattern of healers is apparently 7.8-8 frequencies per second, this is also the electrical frequency of the earth (see Schumann Waves). Since the brain pattern of small children is also in this lower frequency we can understand why children are so special and how they can be easily damaged by adults whose brain pattern is out of synch with the earth and nature.
When we learn to breathe correctly we develop an inner eye which can help to sort through the artificiality and untruths of everything we hear or see from any form of media, we can watch T.V. and notice how many of our entertainers, broadcasters don’t breathe correctly, we can see newspaper photographs and intuitively can see how many politicians, heads of corporations can’t breathe correctly so that their actions may unintentionally be harming not only themselves but also the earth. Notice how many of them develop cancer, heart problems and so on. Perhaps one day, hopefully not too far away, a prerequisite for anyone in the health or alternative healing professions will be that they breathe correctly, otherwise they are unlikely to be very effective.
Written by Anne Shearer