I’ve been doing a lot of breathing recently. Not just the ordinary kind that keeps you alive. But breathing that keeps you calm, healthy, focussed and energised. Suddenly, the importance of breathing is all around me. This week alone, three people have helped me learn to breathe.
I‘d booked a guided meditation session with Julia on Thursday. I was expecting to be led gently along a woodland path into a green glade. Or perhaps imagine myself lying on a sunny beach with waves lapping over my feet. But no. What she had lined up for me was some hara breathing. I’ve done hara breathing before. And it’s right outside my comfort zone. Both physically and emotionally.
Hara breathing is Japanese in origin. It involves breathing from just below your navel. You take a sharp breath in (like the first gasp of air we take as babies) and then a slow breath out (like the last sigh before we die). It’s noisy. And I feel rather foolish doing it.
Anyway, we’re both sat there making all these being born and dying noises. And after a few minutes, I find myself drifting off. I’m acutely conscious of what’s going on. But I’m relaxed, at peace, and very much in the moment. I’m guessing that (as with other forms of meditation) the more you experience it, the easier it becomes to access that feeling of peace during the day’s moments of stress and anger.
The next morning, I open the weekly email my trainer sends me – the homework I do between our sessions. At the beginning of each of the three workouts he’s outlined, there’s an exercise to improve my inhaling (it’s not as good as my exhaling apparently). I’m to lie on the floor with a kettlebell on my stomach, inhaling through the nose deep into the tummy for 5 minutes (and presumably exhaling at some point too, although this isn’t specified).
It’s not the first time Matt’s emphasised the importance of how and when I need to breathe. It’s part of every single kettlebell move I do. And he sees it as so important that I can end up practicing it for half the session until I get it right. Breathing in with the effort and out as I release has been part of weight training for me for years. But this takes it to another level. It often involves an absurd hissing noise, followed by an undignified snort. Again, I have to admit that it works. Proper breathing focuses you. And when you’re focussed you can execute the moves more effectively. It means better posture and balance. And it’s been part of enabling me to use heavier weights than I ever thought possible.
Later that day I called my friend Lyn. “I can’t stop long,” she said. “I’m about to teach a client to breathe.” Lyn, among other things, is a massage therapist. Over recent months she’s found various ways to continue helping some clients without seeing them face to face. Many are anxious right now. And teaching breathing techniques is something she can do to help them alleviate that. There’s breathing for preventing panic attacks, breathing for releasing stress, breathing for strengthening your immune system and more, she tells me.
Before I know where I am, she’s teaching me marksman breathing – specifically for when you need a moment of extreme focus in sport. “In, two, three, four,” she’s saying. “Pause, two, three, four. Out, two, three, four, five, six. Pause two…” Next week, we’re doing a zoom session so that I can find out more!
My friends have been learning all kinds of new skills and hobbies this year: watercolour painting, jewellery making, piano playing, speaking a language, gardening, yoga. Me? I’m learning to breathe.