Breathing for Life

Since I started studying many different areas of both human and personal development including NLP, Hypnosis, parts of Hinduism, parts of Sikhism, Yoga, Western and Eastern energy systems and much more, there has been one area that consistently jumps out at me and seems to be the basis of so much of each of these things.

That area is breathing.

I remember having a friendly debate at work one day and deciding to use it as an opportunity to sharpen my Sleight of Mouth skills. Throughout the conversation I switched between the different patterns and back again noticing how each was affecting the direction of the debate. At some point I started to notice that I was getting frustrated and that the other person seemed to be gaining some ground on their side of the debate and I couldn't quite figure out why. My voice started to become higher, I was straining to speak and my arguments seemed to be getting more and more irrational as I tried to defend my position. It was at this point that I noticed something odd. Throughout the entire debate I'd hardly breathed. In fact not only had I not breathed much, I'd been holding my breath for the last 5 minutes.

If you've ever worked with a client in a hypnosis session or something similar, you're probably aware of what happens when the person first comes in. To begin with they're usually somewhat flustered, possibly a bit nervous about what's to come and they're usually ready to bombard you with every problem they've ever had since birth in the hope that you'll work your magic and fix everything in one session. At this point you have a couple of options; you can either entertain their manic bombardment of issues and problems or just do something more productive. This is something I like to do even before the session "begins" because it's so important and so integral to the way everything else will work that to me, it just makes sense to do it straight away - I get the person breathing.

In western society and in the general day to day running of our lives, breathing has become something that many of us have pushed to the back of our minds in placement of much more important things like worrying. The thing is, when you start to breath, really breath, things begin to change automatically. Your lungs open up, blood begins to flow more freely around your body and up into your head, the muscles in your stomach begin to relax, oxygen starts to enter your blood stream in the correct quantities and suddenly the world seems like a different place.

For centuries people have been meditating and at the heart of meditation is breathing. At the heart of doing Yoga is breathing, at the heart of almost all spiritual practices and energy practices breathing is where it begins and at the heart of being alive we find breathing.

"I've got to keep breathing. It'll be my worst business mistake if I don't." - Sir Nathan Rothschild

Here's an exercise taken from the Sodharshan Chakra Kriya pranayama:

1. Sit with your spine straight and your chin lifted slightly so that your neck lines up with your spine.
2. Place your left hand on your left knee
3. Cover your right nostril with your first finger of your right hand with the rest of your fingers pointing upwards
4. Take in a deep breath through your left nostril, first expanding your stomach and then allowing your lungs to fill and finally allowing your shoulders to rise with the breath.
5. Hold this breath for 10 seconds as you mentally chant the phrase "Wahay Guru" (Wa Hay Guru) in your head.
6. Place your right hand on your right knee and cover your left nostril with the first finger of your left hand with the rest of your fingers pointing upwards.
7. Breath out of your right nostril

You can repeat this as many times as you feel is right for you. If you've never done this before, give it a go a couple of times then stop. Notice how different you feel and what effects this has had on your physiology.

As well as this you can also practice taking in deep sucking breaths as if you're drinking the air, hold it for a second or two and then breathe out with the words "Wa Hay Guru" as you elongate them to fill the entire out breath. The words themselves are used to create a type of vibration that, along with the breathing, begins to open up your lungs, blood flow and other energy systems.

This kind of breathing is something I'd recommend doing every day and you can also work on more subtle ways of doing the same thing for use in meetings or on the train.

I'd love to hear about your experiences giving this a go so please leave a comment.

For more articles like this please visit my website at Warmth on the soul where you can also subscribe to my newsletter over on the right hand side.

Love, Jamie

Source: Breathing for life | Warmth on the soul

The exercise of Pranayama is something I've reaped the benefits of for a long time. Till few years back, I used to get hyper-anxious quite often especially prior to exams etc. By chance, I had a training in Pranayama and started doing it regularly not knowing what its benefits where then. But then, after a few months I found that my anxiety had gotten reduced dramatically; I felt more calm and centred even when situations proved too tough to handle. I was suffering from Sinusitis and head-aches were kind of a norm for me. But all of that became history once Paranayama started working its magic in my mind-body. Other benefits include improved concentration and strengthening of the digestive system.

I'd recommend flexible breathing

That is; Being flexible about how you approach the issue of breathing.

Of course its a semi-automatic thing, but that doesn't mean you have to always get deliberate about how you breathe.

I would rate it more as a good indicator of state

Take a sample of breathing situations (running, relaxed, performing optimally in various situations), and use feedback from breathing to allow for good alignment of resources.

If breathing is a little labored and dysfunctional, probably do some stretching to see if you can free up the breathing.

If its not optimal in the long term, consider doing more aerobic activity, such as walking uphill.

Another factor would be to become more aware of sub-optimal breathing by looking at diet. Does coffee, cakes, vegetarian food, sherbet dibdabs screw it up?

Sure, you can get deliberate and forceful about breathing, but I'd say its also a good idea to allow for aligning things for optimal breathing, and for using breathing patterns as a way of assessing any other related factor that can be adjusted.

Rich

In western society and in the general day to day running of our lives, breathing has become something that many of us have pushed to the back of our minds in placement of much more important things like worrying. The thing is, when you start to breath, really breath, things begin to change automatically.

I think you may have missed something here. One of the ways people cut the thought and emotional processes artificially and forcefully is to put tension in the body usually neck, shoulders, chest or diaphragm. This is how people resist their ongoing experience if they don't like it and can't accept it. This is also why people who make a lot of decisions that they would rather not make get stiff neck and shoulders. Shoulders, neck and head are common because of the prevalence of conceiving of thinking and decision making taking place in the head. People tend to conceive of emotions as happening in the body so cut breathing etc. People often call these tensions the result of stress but its rather more interesting than that. I do not like the word stress as it hides what is going on.

Essentially, by getting someone to breath fluidly and relax completely, you are getting someone to not resist their experience because the two processes are incompatible. To resist you need to put tension somewhere.

Its not that worrying is more important than breathing to them, its that stopping breathing and tensions elsewhere gives resistance to their worrisome thoughts and feelings. It is a solution albeit one with its own consequences.

This might seem like a tangent but bear with me..

I never had any success with my previous nail biting using all the standard hypnosis/NLP techniques. They would work for a day or two and then it would come back. Recently, I took a very different approach as I realized that the behavior which most techniques operated on was not the real problem, so I would basically just retrain myself into the same behavior shortly after (the other alternative would be symptom substitution like eating instead of smoking etc). What I did was to notice what happened in my body before the behaviour even began to occur. This consisted of a number of phenomena, some of which involved holding my breath, tension in the diaphragm and tension in my upper forearm which would creep down my arm towards my hand (at the end of this chain the behavior would start). There was also some emotion which I wanted to resist and so amplified the resistance. I treated these things and the behavior just disappeared. I used resources to retrain these such as how my arms feel when drumming as then they flow freely and how my breathing operates then etc. Essentially what I had was a problem (emotional habit of not liking some of my internal experience so I had labeled it as bad which is a kind of belief), a solution to that problem (resistance of experience by holding breath/arm tension) and a solution to the unpleasant side effects of that solution (biting behavior).

It is impossible to maintain many problems without the required tension. It is just part of peoples solution to the problem but the solution to the solution is often reported as the problem!

So to your quoted comment above, I would say breathing is important and allows change of response in that moment but the question then for me is how do you get natural breathing to occur in context of the problem situation? My experience is that even people who do breathing exercises often do not generalize this to the problem situation. They use it to "reset" the system after but then they keep needing to reset it on a regular basis. Not that this is a bad thing. Its a great patch on most problems and enhances the ability to cope with the problem.

Hi John

I think your required tension idea is good.

I often thought about the re-setting idea that people claimed with meditation techniques in their ads etc.

Here is a link on pranayamic breathing NLP material


Pranic Healing, NLP, Pranic Facelifts, Pranic Healing Research, Pranic Healing News


Your required tension idea sounds to me to be a lot more plausible.

Rich

The exercise of Pranayama is something I've reaped the benefits of for a long time. Till few years back, I used to get hyper-anxious quite often especially prior to exams etc. By chance, I had a training in Pranayama and started doing it regularly not knowing what its benefits where then. But then, after a few months I found that my anxiety had gotten reduced dramatically; I felt more calm and centred even when situations proved too tough to handle. I was suffering from Sinusitis and head-aches were kind of a norm for me. But all of that became history once Paranayama started working its magic in my mind-body. Other benefits include improved concentration and strengthening of the digestive system.

Pranayama is awesome stuff and there are numerous variations. Quite a bit of good EEG and brain mapping research behind it, too.

Here's my own NLP-influenced take on it:
Pranayama - The Art of Breath by Philip H. Farber

And citations of some research here:
Yoga Links - Yoga Research Melatonin EEG ECG HRV head heart brain
ScienceDirect - Consciousness and Cognition : EEG paroxysmal gamma waves during Bhramari Pranayama: A yoga breathing technique

Hi John,

From what you've written above it sounds like you have some interesting ideas.

This is how people resist their ongoing experience if they don't like it and can't accept it. This is also why people who make a lot of decisions that they would rather not make get stiff neck and shoulders.

I agree that when people do things they're not happy with they tend to exhibit these kinds of things in some physical external manner, in the same way that I believe most internal processes have some external output. What you've said in the quote above is quite interesting and I'm interested in knowing how you noticed this and how you verified it as being true for most people.

I never had any success with my previous nail biting using all the standard hypnosis/NLP techniques. They would work for a day or two and then it would come back. Recently, I took a very different approach as I realized that the behaviour which most techniques operated on was not the real problem, so I would basically just retrain myself into the same behaviour shortly after (the other alternative would be symptom substitution like eating instead of smoking etc).

I always find it quite interesting to notice how people build up a plausible argument and this statement stood out to me. Are you saying here that the NLP techniques didn't work because the technique doesn't work, that you were using the technique on the wrong issue, that NLP techniques don't deal with the actual problem or a combination of each of those?

The thing I've noticed with what you phrased "They would work for a day or two and then it would come back." is that when the new choice made available to a person is not as compelling as the old choice and the old choice is more familiar than the new (i.e. the Nelper didn't remember to make the old behaviour less familiar than the new) then usually the person in question does exactly what we set up i.e. they go for the most compelling and familiar choice available. If Nelping is about creating more choice and freedom in a person’s life then it makes sense for the person to go for the choice which is easiest for them.

What I'm getting from your post is that often people use tension to feel something other than the bad feelings they don't want and even when they use breathing as a reset, they slowly slip back into the problem state. I think this could quite possibly be true although I'm asking myself whether them being tense is a contributor to the problem state it's self...i.e. If they tried out some of these breathing techniques they may find that the issues either vanish or are reduced significantly.

It's interesting to look at both of those aspects and I'm sure there are even more points of view.

What I've suggested above is a small component in a larger model of change. I'm not saying that this kind of breathing will solve all problems for all people in all contexts, simply that it's a useful place to start from and as you correctly point out, often the problems people report are not the problems that really need dealing with. That's the job of a good Nelper though, figuring out which pin to pull out that will bring the entire structure crumbling down so that we can begin to build new structures and new ways of living that replace the old ways.

It’s a great patch on most problems and enhances the ability to cope with the problem.

You're right, it is a great patch on most problems, if you use it as a patch on most problems. Personally the breathing techniques I've described above would be used in a way that works with the direction of the overall change taking into account the larger structure of the person being worked with. You can use the techniques as a patch, or you can use it as a tool to take a person is a certain direction so that they begin to think in a new way and stop defending their old ways of thinking and old behaviours...or you can do something else with it.

One of the ideas that I want to present with my post above is that we can take seemingly normal everyday activities and do them in new ways to get new results. It's like maths, you take old concepts and old ideas and you plug them together in new ways to create new results. The same goes for writing and speaking. You take the same old letters that have been around for however many hundreds of years and that everybody knows and everybody uses, and you put them in a certain order and then people start to have new experiences, new ideas, and they start to change how they think about things.

Philip: You happen to be one of the influences for my article above. After watching most of your DVDs and reading your books, again, I noticed that breathing is a major part of the things you do and the way you help people to create new experiences. I'm looking forward to the training with you here in the UK. It's going to be a lot of fun.

Thanks to everyone who's replied. I've learned some new things and taken a lot out of what everyone's said.

Keep these ideas coming; I'm sure there's a lot more for us all to learn.

Love, Jamie

Hi,

Lots to learn indeed! Thanks for the interesting information Jamie and John.

Violeta

In terms of processes (or rituals), the concept of breathing is a good starting point simply because of that control you have over something that is automatic.

Perhaps there is more to it than that, the fact that you can control the autonomic function (to hold your breath for example). Its not just the feeling of control, its the fact that you can change state (physically and mentally) very quickly by intervening with a breathing technique (eg holding the breath for 20 seconds).

From that point you can choose to do a range of other things. Of course its not the only possible starting point, but its a good one. Another (similar) one is to utter a very long sentence (almost a magical incantation or suggestion, or a long musical phrase). The long outbreath will have a similar state break function.

At least thats the sort of thing people are talking about

Here is a link to a science of change NLP source.

How To Change Behavior Instantly With NLP

And some information on NLP training with wicca, shamanism, tantra, magick and so on.

NLP Training Courses - The Lesson of Mastery

An acquantance recommended the latter course as it showed some interesting ideas on the origin of things, and it does involve some of the breathing techniques/ideas similar to the ones described in this thread.


Rich

What I did was to notice what happened in my body before the behaviour even began to occur. This consisted of a number of phenomena, some of which involved holding my breath, tension in the diaphragm and tension in my upper forearm which would creep down my arm towards my hand (at the end of this chain the behavior would start). There was also some emotion which I wanted to resist and so amplified the resistance. I treated these things and the behavior just disappeared.

That's great, John! What you have touched upon by doing that, is the crux of a meditation technique called Vipassana. Though it is difficult to give an overview of Vipassana, the technique esentially involves observing your breathing as well as body sensations without identifying with any of those changes. Hundreds of people who had addictions/other behavioural problems had those issues solved after they started practicing this ancient mediation technique, though the main object of the method is not healing. As we progress in our practice of Vipassana, we start observing breathing changes as well as body sensations during our mundane activities. You will start seeing your usual behavioural patterns changing for better day by day. Your account of resolving your nail-biting problem, shows how much of introspection and self-awareness you have. Forgive me if you already know about Vipassana.

On the subject of distant observation of sensation/feeling, this factor is definitely an important aspect of change, and thinking in general. Its not surprising that India and Pakistan have the first univerisities in the world.

The act of being aware without overreacting is certainly something to practice. Going through this practice on breathing and body sensation is a key example, especially as your body and breathing are so key to your existance and survival. They are potentially anxiety and distraction triggering elements. So practicing a fully aware non-judgmental or non reactive mindfullness, will most possibly set things up for useful transfer of that skill to other domains, such as thinking, discussion, overcoming limiting beliefs, challenging assumptions, and so on.

I never found awareness of breathing to be good for focused calm per se. But the regular practice leads to a mind that has developed that skill.

Rich