The Tao of Natural Breathing_ For Health, Well-Being, and Inner Growth - Dennis Lewis [54]
PRACTICE
To prepare for this practice, sit or stand in the basic posture. Put your hands on your belly, and sense your weight sinking downward. Breathe naturally into your abdomen, letting it expand as you inhale and contract as you exhale. Continue in this way until you can really sense your belly from the inside. Now let your chest, and especially your sternum, sink downward. Sense how your chest relaxes as this sinking movement takes place. Take several more abdominal breaths, allowing your chest to remain motionless.
1 Expel the air with sharp exhalations
When you feel ready, expel the air from your lungs through your nose with a strong contraction of your abdominal wall. In other words, exhale by drawing your belly back toward your spine in one rapid movement. The effect of this movement is to push your diaphragm upward, thus expelling air from your lungs. After the exhalation, let your lungs automatically refill themselves without any effort on your part and without any intentional pause. Let the vacuum you have created in your chest do the work. Your lungs will probably fill to about one-half of their capacity; in any event, do not let them refill completely before your next forced exhalation. Again, contract your abdominal wall, forcibly expelling the air from your lungs. Put your attention completely on the exhalation; let the inhalation take care of itself. Continue breathing in this way, starting at a rate of one complete breath every three or four seconds and gradually working to a rate of one every second (over many weeks and months).
2 Check for unnecessary tension
The key to this practice is to be sure that your breath is being regulated by your abdominal contractions and expansions. Scan your chest, neck, shoulders, and face to make sure that they remain relaxed. People often grimace when they try this exercise, and the unnecessary tension closes off the nasal passages and constricts the flow of both breath and energy. This can cause headaches and other problems. When you find unnecessary tension any place in your body, smile into it, and start again. Do not continue with bellows breathing if you can sense pain or discomfort, especially in your head, chest, or belly. If you do feel pain, take a break and then start again at the beginning, breathing naturally into your belly with full awareness.
Because bellows breathing involves breathing much faster than normal, many people associate it with hyperventilation. If you carry out bellows breathing correctly, however—using not your chest muscles but rather your abdominal muscles—you will not experience the extreme symptoms often associated with hyperventilation, such as intense dizziness, ringing in the ears, and even fainting. You may, however, especially when you first start bellows breathing, feel some dizziness. This dizziness is not just the result of the change in the oxygen/carbon dioxide balance in your blood, but is also a temporary result of opening the energy channels. If you do feel dizzy, or if you feel you aren’t getting enough oxygen, stop bellows breathing, take a long slow inhalation, hold your breath for several seconds, and then exhale. You can do this as many times as necessary. Then start bellows breathing again. At the beginning, start with nine breaths. Then graduate to 18, 36, and so on, over a period of weeks or months until you can breathe for two minutes or more in this way.
Bellows breathing is especially effective in the early morning, in the fresh air, to help jump-start your day. But it can also work wonders when you feel physically, emotionally, or mentally tired, upset, or out of sorts. Whenever you do the exercise, let your belly do the work. Be sure to take clear sensory impressions of yourself both before, during, and after this practice. It is through these impressions that you will