[tmbchr]™

Proper Yoga Diaphragm Breathing Techniques



Does anybody know the “real deal” on this stuff? (If so, put it into your skills inventory - it’s important) I’ve heard various people say different things, but I just had a fairly remarkable flush of energy through experimenting with the following:

  1. Stand up perfectly straight. Easiest way I’ve found to stretch to your full height with proper bone alignments: imagine there is a cord coming out of the top of your head from the ceiling. Act as though your head were hanging from that cord and the rest of the body is just compelled by gravity to hang in a state of natural loose balance.
  2. Focus completely on this. Do not be doing something else to distract you. Completely focus. You know you can. (It’s just a matter of practice…)
  3. Contract the diaphragm upwards into the rib cage while breathing inward. Imaging the diaphragm as the floor of an elevator, which as it rises pushes the people standing on it up the building. Push that muscles upwards slowly and steadily and keep pushing it until you feel a little bit light-headed and then keep pushing it past that and past that and just a little more until you can feel your heart beating.
  4. Push the diaphragm downward on exhale. Do not focus on your lungs. Do not focus on your ribcage. Focus on raising and lowering the floor of that elevator. What you are doing is WORKING OUT A MUSCLE: a muscle which helps you breath and stay alive. One of the two most important muscles you have: and yet you’re using not exercising it all that well or intentionally. No wonder you are plagued with health problems!

Keep doing that and PUSH push push that muscle till it becomes freakin’ rock hard like. What you’ll begin to discover quite quickly is that how much air you take in and how you hold it has direct impact on your emotional states and states of mind. You may even find - like I was grossed out to discover - that I was expelling some air that was not so pleasant: it seemed as though there was some lingering “hot air” in there that had a foul odor, possibly indicating those areas of my lungs had not been thoroughly activated in quite some time.

Doing this for only a few minutes rigorously has suddenly left my body with an intensely cleansed, tingly fresh feeling.

Imagine you did that all the time?







9 Reader Responses

  1. Ted Heistman Says:
    September 17th, 2007 at 11:30 pm

    One thing that may happen too is that you will reverse a hyatal hernia. Chest breathers can get these. When you reverse it you may relaese a lot of pent up negative emotions trapped in there. This happened to my Aunt.

  2. Tim Boucher Says:
    September 17th, 2007 at 11:35 pm

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiatus_hernia

    Practice also riding the “elevator” (diaphragm) up and down slowly the “whole building” of your body from toes to top of head.

  3. Crystal Says:
    September 18th, 2007 at 1:48 pm

    It seems counterintuitive to push up for breathing in.

    Am I doing this right?

  4. Tim Boucher Says:
    September 18th, 2007 at 1:53 pm

    “Seems”…

    Don’t focus on breathing: focus on raising and lowering the elevator. Breaths are an after-effect of that mechanism being properly used.

    …but I would still like to hear from an expert on this. All I can tell you is what I have read and what I have experienced firsthand. You should be able to discover what is most effective for yourself through experimentation: which is, after all, how countless generations and cultures have always discovered it.

  5. Ted Heistman Says:
    September 18th, 2007 at 3:06 pm

    push up to breath out.

  6. Tim Boucher Says:
    September 18th, 2007 at 5:06 pm

    That’s actually the opposite of what I am doing, Ted. Whether or not it is “right” according to various traditional practices, I don’t know, but I have tried that way and found this one to be more successful.

  7. Ted Heistman Says:
    September 18th, 2007 at 6:13 pm

    your diaphram is under your lungs.

  8. Ted Heistman Says:
    September 18th, 2007 at 6:23 pm

    it’s like an accordion. it contracts to dispel air. So your diaphram pushes up, pushes the air out of your lungs. Then it goes down to fill them up.

    The “nerves” are caused by keeping the air high up in your chest. You keep the diaphram up high and don’t push it it all the way down to fill up your lungs. The kind of breathing that relaxes you is belly breathing. Your belly rises and falls instead of your chest.

    I am sure that is what you have been doing.

  9. Tim Boucher Says:
    September 19th, 2007 at 12:05 am

    Actually, no this is the opposite of what I have been doing. That is what I am trying to tell you!

    Think of it like this: doing push-ups is counter-intuitive, right? But what you do is build muscle memory by repeating an action over and over again. In the case of push-ups or weight-training, your body responds to commands to increase muscle memory by adapting resources to meet the increased need: it builds muscle.

    What I am finding is almost similar to a breath push-up. Now that I have started doing it this way, I can feel the breaths literally cleansing my body. The muscles is gaining greater strength and more complete control.

    One of the benchmarks that I am using to determine for myself that this is “right” is that it seems to naturally improve my posture when I breathe using this method. And I find the method your describing has the muscular effect of contracting my midregion and straining slightly muscles in my upper back to pull me out of best posture.

    My observations anyway. Not absolute truths, but based on direct observation and experimentation with my own body and its mechanisms.



SURROUND YOURSELF WITH STRENGTH.