The Unlearning of Breathing
By: Katie Critelli
Tags: Body, Breathing, Personal Development, Health, Exercise

Despite years of meditation and exercise, I got the fundamentals of breathing totally wrong- until I understood the Essential Breath

Introduction

At the start of the global pandemic, the CEO of my company gave us all a memorable piece of advice: “I invite you all to breathe more consciously. This is a virus that aggressively attacks the lungs, so my biggest piece of advice to those of you who are well is to breathe deeply to bring oxygen to your body and peace to your mind.” It was a great piece of advice that perfectly matched our company’s mission: to give people tools to improve their mental health and find relief in the moment.

Yet it was also advice that I disregarded because- as far as I was concerned- I already followed it. Since my teenage years, I’ve exercised, meditated, and experimented with practices like pranayama. For a 27-year-old, I thought I was doing quite well.

That’s why I was completely floored when I recently discovered I had fundamentally misunderstood breathing for most of my life. As I stumbled on a simple form of breathwork, I became aware of tensions within my body that were dramatically restricting my breathing. Upon releasing them, I felt movement and strength return to areas that had been unconsciously cut off for years.

The Importance of the Essential Breath

My unexpected lesson in breathing happened a few weeks back, when I discovered an old book titled “The Breathing Book” by Donna Farhi lying around my room. Skimming through it, I was surprised to find that there were no original exercises and techniques, just an explanation of something called the “Essential Breath”:

Perceiving the essential breath and becoming conscious of its natural state is very different than controlling or manipulating the breath through quick techniques and exercises… Breathing techniques can be very powerful but rarely do artificial means of controlling and manipulating the breath provide long-term, positive benefits.

Farhi defines the essential breath simply as the natural form of breathing we use from birth. It is visible in young children and cats, which breathe with their entire bodies. It is the most efficient way we can breathe and provides oxygen to all of our organs. It also reflects a healthy approach to life: relaxed and accepting, with no extra effort to grasp, control, or resist. Though we all are born breathing this way, it is lost over time through trauma and accumulated tensions. But fortunately, since the essential breath is innate, Farhi argues that no techniques or exercises are required to train it- it can be restored just by using attention to identify and release restrictions in the body.

How I Unlearned Breathing

Curious to find out for myself, I lay down and followed Farhi’s map of attention through the body. First, I concentrated on my pelvis, which Farhi considers the “root” of the essential breath. I began by simply observing the areas of movement and restriction in my pelvis as I breathed. As I moved my attention in all directions- tailbone, right hip, belly, left hip- I noticed that some areas moved fluidly and others were stiff. My tailbone moved in a slight wave with each breath, but my hips did not expand out at all. As I was focusing on them for a minute, something completely unexpected happened:

The tension in my hips completely released. As I inhaled, my right hip expanded outwards and a rush of air seemed to simultaneously flow down my leg and up my back to my fingertips. It was so sudden that I was jolted out of relaxation by the twitching of muscles in my right hip, which felt like they had just woken up. For hours afterwards, I felt a new strength in my fingers and leg, which had likely been under-oxygenated for months, if not longer. It felt as though half of my body had just woken up and in a sense, it had.

The Anatomy of Breathing

As I continued to work through Farhi’s book, I realized that despite spending years trying to control my breathing, I had never taken the time to fully feel it within my body first.

Unfortunately, I believe this is the approach most people take. As a result, we end up knowing very little about how healthy breathing should feel as it moves through our bodies.

As a clear example, while most people know the diaphragm under the rib cage is involved in breathing, it’s rarely mentioned that we have two additional diaphragms: the pelvic and the vocal. If these are not fully relaxed, the diaphragm in our chest cannot fully expand and our breathing becomes limited. For most men and women in the West, the pelvic diaphragm is the first area to become restricted, limiting breathing and causing tension higher up in the body.

We can only breathe fully when all three diaphragms are in a state of relaxation. If they are, the breath will flow freely in all directions in the pelvis, the chest, and around the head. From these key locations, it will flow into the periphery: down the legs to the feet, and down the shoulders to the arms. With consistent attention, restrictions ease and our entire bodies move and flex to the rhythm of our breaths.

The benefits of this type of breathing are both objective and subjective. As Farhi points out, we dramatically underestimate the role of improper breathing in serious health conditions:

“ Breath therapy, sometimes combined with other healing practices such as biofeedback or yoga, has been found to alleviate (and sometimes cure) migraine headaches,1 chronic pain conditions, hypertension (high blood pressure), epilepsy, asthma, panic attacks, and hyperventilation syndrome as well as coronary heart disease. A recent study by Suzanne Woodward and Robert Freedman showed that slow, deep breathing alone will result in a significant reduction in menopausal hot flashes. In a pilot study prior to their own research, progressive muscle relaxation exercises and slow, deep breathing reduced the incidence of hot flashes by an impressive 50 percent.”

While many individuals suffer the immediate and long-term consequences of restricted breathing and poor oxygenation, few know the root of their problems. In addition to the medical impact of breathing better, there is a simple subjective benefit: it feels wonderful. I have made it a nightly routine to observe my breathing and am always surprised that somehow it never gets boring. After years of disconnect from my body, to feel it move as I breathe is both absorbing and grounding.

Show me how you breathe, and I’ll tell you who you are

How we breathe is generally not an accident: it is shaped by culture and our approach to life.

In my own case, I remember being told from a young age not to let my belly expand because it made me look “fat.” I remember becoming angry and ashamed every time I heard this (starting around age 8), and each time it sunk in a little further. Like most women, who are either explicitly or implicitly told to stay thin and pursue a flat stomach, I stopped breathing fully. Like so many people I see on a daily basis, I unconsciously pulled in my stomach and pushed breathing up into my chest.

The irony of our culture is that we are constantly pursuing self-improvement: we pursue programs that encourage us to breathe more slowly, to alternate nostrils, to achieve 6 breaths per minute, and so on. But we rarely undo the existing tension in our bodies and end up reinforcing destructive patterns of restriction instead. What I am grateful to Donna Farhi for is that she recognizes this irony. She makes clear that breathing- like happiness and health and so many essential things- is already present at birth. We don’t need to seek outside ourselves to find a way to improve something that’s been there the entire time. If we just remove the blocks, perfect breathing happens on its own.