This chapter is a final installment into the Air element inquiry. Let’s recap where we’ve been and chart our future course.
In the previous weeks we’ve looked at the Ayurvedic approach to health and healing, and discussed the qualities of Space and Air – first two of the five Ayurvedic elements. Our last week’s conversation ended with a DIY invitation to examine the nature of your breathing habits. What did you find out?
Somewhere in the beginning of the Pain Ecology conversation I called Ayurveda “a perfect tool for self-learning”. Oftentimes, when we first land on a yoga mat or start on a self-healing journey, we expect big sensations and grand discoveries. It takes years to understand that progress on this path frequently shows up as a gradual refining of one’s self-awareness. As we trudge along, we become more aware of subtle sensations, deeply ingrained values, barely visible habits, and fleeting thought patterns that drive us into physical, mental and emotional rock-n-roll. We learn to recognize, and, eventually, deconstruct mental traps that bind us.
Back to the breath DIY inquiry: perhaps you couldn’t find time to witness your breath? Maybe last week’s post felt too drawn out, or the inquiry itself sounded tedious? Whether you did the DIY exercise or not is almost (almost, but not quite) irrelevant. Your reaction to the invitation alone is a gold mine of valuable data: upon close examination it can reveal a lot about your values, priorities, time allocation habits, and a gazillion other curious things that contribute to your healing or ailing.
Well, enough poetic waxing on the perils of the journey!
Let’s take a closer look at breath-health link.
Did you know that human ventilation (a smart scientific word for breathing) has perched itself right smack in the middle of two unique tracks in evolutionary development? Like most land animals, humans have autonomic respiration: we can breathe without thinking about breathing. Like most marine animals, we also have the ability to control and even stop our breath at will. Scientists hypothesize that it is this remarkable adaptation that lead, or at the very least, heavily contributed to language development. Yup, the mechanics of speaking actually involve breath holding and exhaling in tiny little sips. Could a disrupted breath pattern be a contributing factor in increased upper-body tension for those who speak for a living (like teachers, for example)? I look forward to discussing this possibility at Mighty Peace teachers’ convention in March.
Are you feeling calm or agitated?
Sitting quietly in your chair or climbing a high peak?
Healthy breathing is extraordinarily malleable; it responds with ease to a change in physical or psychological demand. Trouble happens when breathing looses its elasticity and becomes rigid. A lot can be said about the mechanics of breathing; however, this topic is best reserved for individual and in-class conversations. Instead, let’s take a look at breath-health connection: what happens when breath loses its adaptability?
Are you stuck in a fight-flight promoting upper body breathing habit? Do you hold your breath when trying to focus? Slump in your computer chair, making full breath practically impossible? Coincidentally, the upper-body breathing is often paired up with abdominal tension. This faulty pattern alone can lead to neck-shoulder tension, gut troubles, unavailable core muscles, pelvic pain, and unstable lumbar spine… The variety of poor breath habits range from chest breathing, to collapsed breathing, to hyperventilation and throat holding, each with its own physical and psychological symptoms.
Many of us, if not all of us, hold the same tensions and restrictions within our breathing muscles, as we do in our posture and our movement. Our lifestyle habits – poor posture (read more about your body as a container for your breath), unhealthy movement patterns, chronic stress, inefficient coping mechanisms – all contribute to a vicious circle situation. Tension is present in the fast shallow breathing when we are anxious or stressed; it is with us when we go for a walk or a run; it is also there when we are relaxed or even on a yoga mat, trying to breathe deeper. Yoga students know that everyday breathing habits have a peculiar way of showing up on the yoga mat. That’s part of the reason why yoga practice can be so effective in healing persistent tension and pain disorders.
Pain brings its own challenges to the way we breathe. Healthy breathing provides a natural massage to the entire body. This massage is, in itself a pain reliever, signaling the nervous system that all is well. Unfortunately, pain disrupts healthy breathing: most of us, consciously or subconsciously, tense up and hold the breath in response to pain. This pattern often causes the perpetuation of pain, often not from the original sensation, but from our reaction to it and our imagining of what might happen if the pain continues or gets worse. For many Pain Care Yoga students, repairing and re-patterning the breath is a real game changer. Can it be effective for you?
Try a “Gasp test” to find out:
Exaggerate a gasp pattern of breathing (a kind of breathing you do when someone jumps out at you). If the pain increases it is very likely that breath retraining will be very helpful in reducing the pain.
Here is one of the Pain Care Yoga principles you might find useful in day-to-day life:
Exhale: whenever we anticipate painful stimuli, our natural tendency is to inhale and hold the breath. Exhale instead. Observe what happens.
See you next week!
