Taijipedia

Just around the time we both dropped off the face of the earth with assorted life-events, we were talking about breathing, and more importantly, how breathing can help you with your Taiji practise ,stress control etc. etc. etc.

Greeny mentioned that we should answer the rather obvious question of how you should actually breathe. Now, there are lots of ways to breathe, and different schools will tell you many different things and go through lots of different techniques. There’s to name but a few, tonic breathing, reverse breathing, abdominal breathing, burst breathing, the list goes on. What we’re going to focus on here is abdominal breathing, the simplest and most natural way of breathing.

If you’re fortunate enough to have a young child or baby available, just watch them when they’re sleeping. They breathe abdominally. We can all agree that babies have not had the opportunity to develop bad breathing habits, so their bodies are just going to breathe however they want to, i.e. abdominally. If you hearken back to the post on just letting your body breathe, that’s what your body will do if you just let it do the breathing, but for you all who find this difficult (and we had quite a few emails from those of you who found letting go and letting your body breathe) this is the exercise that can help you bridge the gap between breathing consciously and breathing naturally.

The title of this post might sound a bit like a Zen koan, but it’s something one of my teachers asked me if I could do. In typically traditional and mystical fashion, he left me to figure out what it meant.

I spent quite a bit of time contemplating the question, pondering the nature of the breath, looking at different breathing techniques, observing the breath to see if I could shed light on the rather cryptic lesson. At the time I was at the height of my Taiji nerdity, and I systematically went through all the principles to see if they would shed any light on how to breathe without breathing. Reaching the answer took a few years.

In that typically clichéd Golden Harvest Kung Fu movie fashion, the answer came to me whilst I was reminiscing about my childhood in Malaysia. It’s one of my earliest memories, and I think I was about five. One day I became acutely aware that I was breathing. My chest was moving and air was entering my lungs before I emptied my lungs. I was concentrating on breathing in, filling my lungs, and breathing out, emptying them. It occurred to me that I was controlling my breath and then it all came crashing into my fragile 5-year old mind.

What happens if I stop trying to breathe?

Naturally, this really scared me. What would happen? Would I stop breathing and asphyxiate? Was it possible for me to survive without breathing? What’s Mum going to say when she realises I’m not breathing? Ahmagawd! I’ve not even done my chores! I couldn’t contemplate the consequences to the last question, but I knew they’d be worse than when I shaved my eyebrows off for a laugh.

You might be thinking that it’s all kinda obvious, that I’d have to have been breathing, but to my little 5-year old brain predisposed to missing the obvious, it posed a rather interesting and frightening problem.

This was the point when I realised that I’d got so caught up in the retribution I’d get for not doing my chores. I’d stopped trying to breathe, but a funny thing was happening. I was still breathing! I was not consciously trying to control my breath, and I was just letting my body breathe by itself as it wanted to. I was breathing, without breathing

Naturally I was relieved that this was the case. I’d be able to get my chores done, and all those images in my mind of being a zombie child vanished (The music video of Thriller was fresh in my mind). No life of being undead for me, I’d still be alive and breathing although I’d probably not stay that way for much longer if I didn’t get my chores done.

Now having worked it out, and put it into my practise, I have come to understand the wisdom of my teacher. Here are three ways breathing without breathing can help your Taijiquan:
- You won’t hold your breath – Your body is doing the breathing so it’ll always keep itself breathing, only pausing naturally between each breath. As you’re not holding your breath, you won’t hold tension, which leads me on to..
- You can explore deeper levels of relaxation: Now that you’re not unconsciously tensing yourself up by holding your breath, your body is free to relax even further, for free! You won’t have to concentrate on relaxing as your body will start to do it for you.
- You let your body do what it needs to: Your body will take in as much air as it needs at any given time, and the best thing to do is to just let it do this. You can trust it, it knows how hard, how fast and how deep it needs to breathe.

The last point is by far the most powerful one. We sigh to release tension, we breathe quicker and more deeply to feed our muscles oxygen, our body regulates our breathing for us to do whatever we need at the time, and we don’t even have to think about it.

It’s amazing if you think about it.

One of the fundamental steps in healing is to stop doing anything that’s going to make the situation worse, and letting the body breathe and regulate itself is one way of doing this.

Even if we have bad breathing habits, our body will, if we just let it, start to breathe appropriately for our state at the time. All we have to do is get out of the way.

So how do you learn to breathe without breathing?

The principle is easy to explain and is an extension of the technique explained in the post about breathing and form.

All you have to do is to become more aware of your breathing, observe and understand it, watch how it changes and what happens to it when you do various activities.

When you become aware of your breathing, you will then know when you are messing with it, i.e. deliberately breathing like I did when I was 5, or when you are letting your body breathe.

Deliberate breathing has a different feel altogether, like when you breathe in just before a sigh.

Natural breathing just happens. Stop your breath for an instant, and then just watch what happens next. Your body will just start breathing again, all by itself, and that feeling of your body just doing it, is what you need to get to.

This can be a bit scary, the conscious mind starts to think like me when I was 5. It’ll probably say

“WHAT!!! NOT BREATHING???!? ARE YOU NUTS!!?”

Yeah, big scary caps like that. Ignore your conscious mind. If my little story from when I was 5 proves, your body will simply start to breathe as nature intended it to.

A question I get asked a lot in class is how to breathe whilst you’re doing your Taiji form. It’s difficult to answer it because how you go about learning breathing in your Taijiquan form isn’t intuitive. You can’t just give a student a pattern to breathe to as it’s a sure way to see someone go blue in the face as they try to do the form with the “correct” breathing.

You can always spot someone who’s trying to breathe to a pattern, because they’re usually the ones holding their breath. A posture that takes a bit longer than normal to complete means they’ll have to exhale for a lot longer, but because they’re not so good at it yet, they exhale almost completely by the time they’re 2/3 of the way through the posture and then hold their breath for the rest. This makes them hold tension and is a little self-defeating. They’re putting a lot of effort into relaxing themselves off, only to have their breathing pattern tense them up again.

Practising form for long periods breathing like this isn’t good because the body will, eventually pick up on that habit of holding the breath and start doing it, which means more tension.

Not good. It just ain’t Taiji as there’s no continuous change in the breath.

The other reason why you can’t just take a breathing pattern and shove it into the Taiji form is because your body varies quite a bit from day to day, and one day it might find it easy to breathe in the pattern you’ve been given, and the next it might struggle. This is something you don’t have conscious control over, because your body is different from day to day. That’s just the way it is.

One of the ways to get around this is to teach the body to coordinate breathing with movement. This way, whatever your internal state, your body will just start to regulate and synchronise whatever breathing pattern is most appropriate and most relaxing with your movement. It is, however somewhat unintuitive as it doesn’t use your conscious mind. Just try it out and see how it works, even if you don’t believe me.

Practise breathing with very natural movements, such as walking and eventually your body will get the idea, so that when you do start doing Taiji form, your body will automatically breathe to the movement, you won’t have to try to “fit” your breathing to the form.

So, the next time you’re walking along to get somewhere, breathe in for four steps, and out for four steps. As you walk along, gradually increase the length of the breath to ten steps in and ten steps out. Try not to hold your breath in or out at any point. If you’re trying to take ten steps and you run out of breath by eight, then that’s your limit for that moment in time. Don’t try to force it, we don’t want anyone going blue in the face. You need to practise long and short breaths, as there are long and short movements in the form. Go as high as you can without tensing up or holding your breath and do this often, try it out when you next walk to the shops or when you’re in the gym.

If you do this often enough, your body will get the idea of co-ordinating movement with breathing and it will automatically start do regulate your breathing during your form practise.

Photo by karloswayne

This week’s Big Idea is Breathing

Breathing in Taiji is one of the big kahunas. It’s because breathing is a primary way we relax ourselves. Think about what you do when you sigh. It’s a way for us to relax and let go of tension.

Try it now, breathe in… and sigh…

Some part inside of you just lets go doesn’t it? It may not come as a surprise then that breathing affects us physiologically in a million different ways. It isn’t a coincidence that so many internal arts and qigong forms empahsise the importance of correct breathing to help the body heal itself.

If you hold your breath, you’re automatically going to hold tension in the body. It’s an unnatural state for your body to be in, stuck in some sort of limbo between breaths, because the body’s natural state is one of constant breathing, constant change. Try it, hold your breath for as long as you can and you’ll notice that there will come a point when your body starts to tense up. Holding the breath is stressful.

What happens when you’re stressed and thinking about a difficult issue? More often than not, you’ll be holding your breath. If you work in an office, watch someone who’s having a bad day. As they concentrate intently, they’ll inhale and hold their breath whilst they’re thinking or trying to do something, then instinctively exhale and sigh as if to try to relieve the stress. When you’re holding tension mentally, or emotionally, you’ll more than likely start to manifest it physically by holding your breath.

As another example, what happens when you get startled, or surprised? Say someone hides behind that tree and jumps out shouting “BOO!”. You get startled, and you breathe in sharply, and then you hold your breath

If you do any sort of martial art and have done some sparring, you’ll know that when you get hit or put under pressure you start to run out of energy quicker, unless you can stop the panic and clear your head. I’ll bet that it’s because you’ll be holding your breath at and the added pressure from your sparring partner just saps your strength quicker.

To handle the stress of childbirth both mentally and physically, pregnant women are taught to breathe. Soldiers in some forces are taught breathing techniques to handle the stress of combat. Just as our internal state can affect our breathing, so can our breathing affect the rest of our physiology.

If you can focus on your breathing and breathe in a more controlled manner, or better yet, just let your body do the breathing, it’ll start to let go of the tension that’s been collecting in the body. If we focus on calming the breath, the body and mind will follow.

This is why breathing is important in Taijiquan.

It’s not because breathing during Taijiquan practise will make our Taijiquan better, it’s because practising breathing correctly will make every part of our life better.

It’ll do that by making you a lot more relaxed for a start.

Once your body gets used to breathing correctly during Taijiquan practise, it’ll start to remember it when you’re in your everyday life. When you hit some turbulence, you’ll instinctively start to breathe more gently to relieve the pressure. You might even find it’s a conscious thing. When you start looking at a new problem at work, you might even catch yourself doing a “Deep breath… let’s go” sort of thing.

It’s the same idea that you’re re-programming the body to do something it does naturally. Just as we can have bad postural habits, we can have bad breathing habits, and practise of Taijiquan with the right breathing can really help us let go of these habits.

And that, can only be a good thing.