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THERE ARE MANY REASONS WHY I PRACTICE CONSCIOUS BREATHING and recommend it to my friends and clients. Some of the reasons are practical, some mystical. Breathing has the power to enhance both the practical present moment and our mystical connection with infinity. It is all there in the breath, free for the asking.
To our ordinary consciousness, breathing only serves to maintain our body. But if we go beyond our mind, breathing can open up a completely new foundation for our life.
—ILSA MIDDENDORF
Breath is so vital to life that to go without it for even a very short time is fatal. The average person can go without food for several weeks, without liquid for several days. But oxygen is a different matter entirely. If you close off the oxygen supply to your brain by pressing the pulse points on the sides of your neck, reality as you know it starts to melt down rapidly. I have done this experimentally on several occasions and have been amazed at how quickly my consciousness changes. There are about ten seconds of gathering mistiness, followed very shortly by utter panic. After four minutes or so without oxygen, your brain will never work the same again.
Since yesterday at this time you have taken perhaps twenty thousand breaths. In your lifetime you will breathe in and out more than a hundred million times. Given the sheer volume, it is very easy to take breathing for granted, to assign it to the deep background of life. But what if you made a tiny improvement in something you did that many times? If you can learn to breathe even a little bit better, you will notice immediate, profound shifts in your physical, mental, and emotional well-being. If you learn to breathe effectively, you will improve the quality of your entire life.
A BREATH OF FRESH AIR
Follow with me the miraculous journey of a breath of fresh air as it makes its way into your system. Darwin is said to have shuddered when he contemplated the complexity of the eye. No less thrilling are the exquisite and delicately balanced mechanisms of breathing. When I began to understand the miracle that takes place on every breath, I found myself taking even more pleasure in my breathing.
The smoke of my own breath, echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine, my respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs …
—WALT WHITMAN
If you are breathing correctly, air begins its life-giving journey by entering your nose. While resting in bed, you inhale about eight quarts of air a minute. Just sitting up doubles your requirement to sixteen quarts a minute. If you go jogging, you will bring in fifty quarts of air a minute. A strong argument can be made for nose-breathing, even in athletic exertion. The air we breathe is only about 20 percent oxygen. There is a tiny amount of carbon dioxide in it, less than one percent, and the rest is nitrogen. But each in-breath also brings with it a swarm of irritants, pollutants, and dust. The nose has a set of filters designed for clearing the larger particles of dust from the air as it heads toward the lungs. Your mouth is not equipped for filtering air, being mainly a food-hole rather than an air-hole. You can breathe through your mouth, but as any stuffy-nosed cold-sufferer knows, a little bit of it goes a long way. Apparently mouth-breathing was so common a habit in the nineteenth century that an author named George Catlin wrote a best-seller with the blunt title Shut Your Mouth! Writing in the florid style of his time, he attributed a wide variety of physical and moral ills to mouth-breathing. Morality aside, the nose is a much better entry point for the breath than its gaping cousin to the south.
Suck space, mouth-breather!
—COMIC-BOOK HERO TO ALIEN INVADER, AS HE THROWS THE ALIEN OUT OF THE SPACESHIP
As air enters the nose, it first encounters a tiny but important set of filters that we can observe as we look in the mirror and tilt our heads back: nose hairs. These hairs offer the first line of resistance to the pollutants and dust particles that float in on a wave of fresh air. After breezing through this little thicket, the air passes a veritable Venus flytrap, the mucus blanket that lines the septum, which separates the nostrils. This sticky substance is designed to trap more dust but to allow the air to flow past freely.
For every in-breath there is an out-breath, and as these two currents meet in the nose, a fine microclimate is set up. Moisture is deposited by the out-breath on the mucus blanket, only to be picked up by the entering in-breath. The in-rushing currents of air grow warmer and more moist as they travel through the hair and past the mucus wall. In a miracle of heat-efficiency, the air reaches body temperature within a little more than an inch of the outside world, even on a cold day. At the top end of the nostril, the air enters the turbinate, a narrower passage that brings the air toward the trachea. The mucous membranes that we first encountered in the nasal cavity run the length of the trachea all the way down to the bronchi of the lungs. Most of us know the painful sensation of the mucous membranes when they are inflamed, when a cold makes every breath an unpleasant experience. Most of the time, though, this structure is painlessly doing its job, trapping finer particles of dust and giving a home to thousands of tiny hairlike structures called cilia. Like a field of seaweed, these cilia are in constant motion.
Viruses an microbes live best in low oxygen environments. They are anaerobic. That means, raise the oxygen environment around them and they die.
—EDWARD MCCABE
And what are they doing, these tiny dancers of the deep? They are engaged in a heroic and thankless task, but one that is absolutely essential for health. They are passing the mucus blanket upward from the lungs, against gravity. Not only is the mucus blanket able to trap particles of dust and debris, but it is also a microbe hunter. It kills unfriendly bugs and drops them overboard toward the stomach, which gives them an acid bath and sends them south. To top it all off, the mucus blanket is richly supplied with white blood cells, providing a long gauntlet of immune-system barriers through which an invading microbe must pass.
The air, growing purer by the inch, sails past these obstructions and into a tough but flexible tube called the trachea. A traveler in a maze of narrowing tunnels, the air then goes into successively smaller passages called the bronchii and the bronchioles, finally reaching home in the tiny sacs of the lung, the alveoli.
The lungs are divided into four lobes, two on each side of the chest, all resting on the diaphragm. So that the lungs may slide around freely in their duties, they are covered by a lining called the pleura, and they are lubricated by a slick substance called surfactant. Down inside the lungs themselves, in the alveoli, a miracle of transformation is taking place. To appreciate the importance of these little sacs, consider the territory they encompass. If you opened them all and spread them out, they would blanket a basketball court. These structures are engaged night and day in a hot and steamy occupation. Here in these tiny carburetors, thousands of gas exchanges are taking place every moment.
Named for grapes because they come in clusters, the alveoli pass oxygen into your blood while the blood passes carbon dioxide back into the alveoli. They are embedded in a network of blood vessels called capillaries. When red blood gets to the alveoli, it releases its carbon dioxide and gathers in fresh oxygen. Oxygenated blood heads toward the heart to be pumped around the body, while the carbon dioxide is given a quick ride out of the body on the out-breath. The oxygen is carried to the cells, which burn it.
There are about 75 trillion cells in your body, and they are all breathing—or should be.
—SHELDON SAUL HENDLER, M.D.
