Breathing practices

Author: Jie Kong

There are many breathing practices and exercises offered at the spiritual marketplace today. You can find traditional systems like pranayamas, tangjon breathing, tummo, joshin kokyu-ho, qigong, as well as modern activities such as rebirthing, holotropic breathing, bodyflex, oxysize, methods of Strelnikova, Buteyko, Kofler, Wim Hof and many others.

They are all very different in terms of approaches and resolving various problems. Some practices are used for medicinal purposes, others for professional, like for singers, and numerous breathing techniques are applied for general wellbeing and stress management.

All practices acknowledge that breath has a huge and varied impact on our life. Breathing gives energy and brings oxygen, but it can also be harmful. For example, long-term shallow breathing can cause problems because the body remains in a cyclical state of stress.

At the beginning of any breathing practice, we need to recognize a built-in physiological pattern of respiration that our body is employing while we are growing. Until the age of twenty-five, we use it to develop our bodies. Often exploration of breathing practices doesn’t go beyond conventional (external) breathing. However, we can alter psychological state and even energy circulation through specific breathing exercises, for example, through developing inner breathing as a practice of energy distillation.

The choice of practices and understanding of what we are doing will significantly affect the outcome of the process. It is essential to notice the connection between breathing practices and their influence on the brain as only concentrated mental focus allows activation of the energy on deeper layers such as in the bone marrow and spinal cord.

The same type of activation we can encounter when we experience an ecstatic state from dancing or from performing some kind of practice or from the process of creation. In this case, we might feel breathless for a while. If we speak from the position of alchemy, at this moment internal breathing replaces external and a person might feel inner pulsation as a form of contraction and expansion inside.

Methods, such as proper attunement of the brain, the correct tuning of movements and the rhythm of the heartbeat allows us intentionally to slow down and cultivate inner breathing.