February: Breath Is Life
Breath is the bridge which connects life to consciousness, which unites your body to your thoughts.
—Thich Nhat Hanh
As I mentioned in my January post, clients in my therapy practice often ask: what’s a good next step after taking the mindful pause?
For many of us, myself included, there’s a constant urgency for something more, a what’s next? inside that feels insatiable. By offering a “what’s next,” I suppose I am running the risk of colluding with our human restlessness—our tendency to do instead of be. So please know that you don’t have to do anything after the mindful pause. It is complete unto itself. But, if you would like a next step, consider the breath: since it is always with us and available to us, it can be a good place to focus after a mindful pause.
Mindfulness teachers often joke that our breath is always with us, right under our noses. It’s been with us from the moment of our birth and will be with us until the end of our lives.
While I consider the breath like a companion who accompanies us throughout our entire life journey, for those of us with asthma and other breathing issues, there can be fear and frustration associated with breathing. If this is your situation, please consider seeking the guidance of professionals who can help you with these issues and see if they recommend breathing exercises to help you develop a more loving and empowered relationship with your breath.
In his New York Times-bestselling book Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, journalist James Nestor hails the breath as the “missing pillar of health.” Drawing on thousands of years of medical texts and indigenous wisdom, as well as the latest research in pulmonology, psychology, biochemistry, and physiology, Nestor illustrates just how important the act of breathing is, and how many of us (myself included!) have been doing it wrong. One of my amazing clients recommended this book to me, and I’ve never breathed the same since.
There are two changes I have made to my own breathing, which Nestor explains as some of the most important and simple adjustments we can make:
1) I try to inhale and exhale through my nose as much as possible, even while exercising and sleeping (sleep tape and other tools can help with the latter), and
2) I make an effort to spend some time each day practicing what he terms “the perfect breath,” in and out through the nose for 5.5 seconds. Honestly, counting in half seconds is beyond me, so I usually round down to 5 or up to 6, which Nestor endorses.
Breathing is an act we perform roughly 25,000 times every day. It’s one of the functions of the body that is done autonomically (our body will do it without our having to think about it, like our heart beating), but it’s also a function we can do very consciously and intentionally.
If, like me, you are interested in working with your breath consciously and intentionally, you can work with breath in the flow of daily life (i.e., while commuting or standing in line), and you can also work with it outside of the flow of daily life (i.e., going to a space where you won’t be interrupted and breathing while not doing anything else). This latter kind of practice is often termed “breathwork.”
Nestor’s book includes instructions for some of his favorite breathing strategies, which you can practice both in and out of the flow of life. Below, I’ll discuss a couple of my own favorites.
Working with Breath In the Flow of Daily Life
As I mentioned above, one of the reasons I love working with the breath is that we don’t have to reach for it. It’s always there; we just have to remember it. And I’m convinced there are as many ways of working with breath as there are stars in the night sky. You can draw from the following strategies, create your own, or both.
Three Mindful Breaths
One of my favorite mindfulness teachers, Zen Buddhist Monk Thich Nhat Hanh, left an incredible legacy of work, including many pocket-sized tools for soothing our nervous systems in daily life. One of my favorite practices is what he termed Three Mindful Breaths.
It builds upon the mindful pause like this: every so often, throughout your day, just stop whatever you’re doing and take yourself through three breath cycles (inhale and exhale three times), and notice with non-judgment everything you can about your breath, like the sound of your breathing, the way your body expands and contracts, and the feeling of the air in your nostrils and throat.
It’s deceptively simple and at face value, you may wonder what kind of measurable impact such a brief exercise could have. Neuroscience findings confirm what the Buddhists have known for thousands of years, which is that the simple act of focusing intentionally on our breathing for just three breath cycles can work to both down-regulate our nervous systems (bring us down out of fight or flight) and also up-regulate our nervous system (bring us up out of freeze).
Give the Breath a Shape
In my final year of graduate school, I had an internship as a mental health therapist in a refugee resettlement program. Many of my clients were arriving traumatized from areas around the globe where their homes and livelihoods had been destroyed, mostly by human-created suffering, such as from war and forced displacement. This was my father’s experience in his first years of life. He was born in a refugee resettlement camp in southern Lebanon after his parents and siblings fled their home in Haifa during the Nakba.
In addition to working with my clients’ case managers to ensure their basic needs were met, I also provided mental health therapy. While each of my clients’ stories and experiences were different, many of them had similar experiences of witnessing the horrors of war and the grief of leaving their homelands. One small way I could help many of them, in a way that was respectful of their religious and cultural beliefs, was to teach them ways of working with breath.
Much of my work with refugees was done with the assistance of translators, but the universal language of breath required little translation. My clients and I would start our sessions with a few minutes of breathing, no words required. Oftentimes, the translators would join in with us.
During this early time in my career, I began to notice that for many people, it was helpful to give the breath a shape (it is invisible, after all). So I began to teach my clients a practice known as square breathing, or box breathing. There are many different iterations of square breathing, but in general, it goes like this (visualize the sides of a square forming with each inhale and exhale):
Inhale for a count of 5, pause for 2
Exhale for a count of 5, pause for 2
Inhale for a count of 5, pause for 2
Exhale for a count of 5, pause for 2
Another shape I enjoy is the image of soft, rolling hills: go up the hill on the inhale, and pause at the top. Go down the hill on the exhale, and pause at the bottom before going up the next one. Or you can use the image of a circle: inhale for a count of 5 and imagine the circle expanding, pause for a count of 2 and then exhale for a count of 5, envisioning the circle contracting.
Whether it’s a box, rolling hills, a circle, or something else, giving your breath a shape is a highly effective strategy for calming the nervous system and regrounding into your most resourced self. It is from that calm and invigorated center that we live our best lives. Practicing with the breath can help you get back to your center and stay there longer.
Our smart phones and watches can lead us through breathing exercises; many of these will display a circle or balloon, which expands and contracts with the inhale and exhale. Whether you use a device to lead you through a breathing exercise or not, I believe it’s a good practice to have a couple of simple breathing exercises committed to memory, so you have them when you need them without relying on a device.
You can also extend the exhale for an additional 2 or 3 seconds, which is excellent for down-regulating the nervous system from a fight or flight response.
Working with Breath Out of the Flow of Daily Life
We’ve just discussed a couple of strategies (Three Mindful Breaths and Giving the Breath a Shape) that you can use during daily life. But if you have the time and inclination, you may benefit from working with breath outside of the flow of daily life (i.e., you set aside time for only this activity; you aren’t doing anything else and you minimize the likelihood of interruption or distraction).
This style of working with breath is often referred to as “breathwork.” There are many well-known breathwork teachers, such as Wim Hof and Jon Paul Crimi, who offer guided breathwork sessions in person at seminars around the world and online. There are also many free and paid apps for breathwork, like Headspace, Insight Timer, and Othership.
In general, breathwork outside of the flow of daily life is done seated on the floor or lying down and usually includes background music, as well as some kind of instruction about how to vary your breathing in order to achieve relaxation, increased energy levels, or some kind of emotional state such as peace or forgiveness of self and others.
I and many of my clients have benefited greatly from breathwork. I think the name of this practice is fitting, as it does usually feel like work. I don’t necessarily experience breathwork as easy or relaxing, but the calm and energized state that follows makes it well worth the effort.
You can find many breathwork videos online, but there’s one I like, in particular, from Othership called Guided Breathwork for Nervous System Reset. I like this one because it is only about 20 minutes long and includes a helpful and informative preamble that explains how the vacillation between slow and rapid breathing resets the nervous system.
As the facilitator explains, the rapid breathing intentionally activates the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system, which is what brings about a fight or flight response. But the breath holds and slower style of breathing then activate the parasympathetic branch, which is what brings us back down into a rest and digest state (think of the parasympathetic like a parachute). By consciously and intentionally turning on and off the stress response, we activate that parachute of the parasympathetic nervous system in order to settle at the end in a calm but enlivened state.
It’s the kind of science that ends up feeling more like magic.
Breathwork is like a mini reprieve that requires some stamina, willingness, and courage. But before you try it for yourself, make sure to become acquainted with the contraindications, which include but are not limited to epilepsy, heart issues, and pregnancy.
If you don’t already have a regular practice of working with your breath, I hope you’ll consider integrating breathing exercises into your life. Whether it’s Three Mindful Breaths once a day or a longer breathwork session behind a closed door, I hope you’ll join me in bringing more of a focus to this missing pillar of health.
For next month’s blog post, we’ll travel further downward into the body to discuss additional ways of joining with our physical vessels to bring more joy and ease to this human experience.
Until then, happy breathing!
