06/06/2023
Movement through breathing awareness
This is not a breathing instruction manual, but breathing is definitely a central component in any type of movement. Especially in the Flystick technique. I have given a lot of thought to how can I explain breathing in written text. Many ask me what is correct breathing. I find the accordion, which produces sound both during inhalation and exhalation, to be the best analogy. The first few lessons with new practitioners that don’t know me are quite. I give basic breathing and movement instructions, and still – I don’t hear anything. I immediately stop the lesson. Moving people are breathing people and when practice is concentrated and intense you have to hear the breathing, it is a part of the lesson. It’s the sound of the class.
Breathing and movement create an equal relationship, where both sides walk together and support each other. When we generate movement it starts with breathing. Every movement has a beginning and an end. I breath between these two points in time. Most people make the common mistake of taking a short, quick breath before an exercise and then perform the movement with the air locked inside their body. This is wrong for body weight based exercises. If you push a car, yes. If you are lifting weights, ok. There is a difference between bending over in the shower to scrub your toes and bending over to pick up your child. These are two completely different activities, with completely different rules. The common quick, short inhalation mistake goes on to the exhalation, which only comes at the end of the movement and is done with effort. This results in an internal build-up of abdominal pressure that affects skeletal, tissue and organ movement. Always remember the accordion, flexing, extending and twisting and playing the song all along.
Here is an experiment for example:
Take a birthday whistle. Remove the paper ribbon. Now exhale and use the whistle to measure how long this lasts. Next, turn the whistle around and hold the wide part between your teeth. Check how long the whistling lasts when you inhale. This is a very significant exercise for understanding how breathing movement works. The whistling will get longer over time. You should also try to balance inhalation and exhalation so that they are as close to equal as possible. I hand out these whistles during my breathing lessons and the students whistle as they move, aiming to produce a good fit between movement ad sound.
I also noticed an interesting regularity: people with exhalation longer then inhalation are “doers”, producers, the type of people that can fix anything. On the other hand, those who inhale longer and better are the ambitious kind, dreamers and fantasy makers. All of us are made of both, but the dominant part correlates to out breathing. I hope that eventually, also aided by Flystick, ambitious people will balance themselves out by doing, and doers will let their thoughts drift away to new places because they sometimes feel like they are not getting enough air.
As time went by I understood something else: The diaphragm is located differently in each of us. This is related with a person’s posture, movement, body structure, emotional ties and autobiographical properties and components. A simple structural example is the potbelly. It pulls the diaphragm outwards causing it to have a low starting point. Another postural example is a bent upper back, which limits how far the diaphragm can go up and down. Diaphragm height is not observable on the outside, but is easily distinguishable through breathing exercises from beginner to master. Like traditional eastern pranayama. From this fact we realise that each practitioner’s starting point is different. On the other hand, all of us have the potential to change. In body and life: through practicing breathing and movement you can get to optimal use of your breathing system in anything related to movement practice and teaching (ignoring the chemical and cellular breathing subject at the moment). Apart from the height of our diaphragm, there are nervous obstacles which also originate from how our lives unfolded, the quality of our functional movement and our emotional spectrum. For instance: stagnation in the side ribs during breathing. Check somebody near you, place your hands on the sides of his/her ribs and see if he/she controls their side rib motion, and if any movement even happens. You will be surprised to learn that it is not obvious that this type of movement exists. It’s not something our brain necessarily does. Why? Again, I emphasize, we experience trauma. Sometimes it can be enough to stop the movement in our false ribs and over time, like any unmoving tissue, the area thickens and gets harder to move. The nerve impulse can only travel thanks to nerve potential which only appears according to our will power aiming to move the lungs. If you get up and start running without any early preparation to awaken relevant body parts you might fail and find yourself back on the sofa in despair.
All these limitations are directly related to diaphragm function and the effect it has on the content above it (heart and lungs) and the content below it (internal abdominal organs-liver, stomach, intestines, kidneys, reproduction organs, all the way down to the pelvic floor). Our diaphragm is the heart of movement. It is connected to the spine and reaches all the way to our legs using vital muscles from our evolutionary past. It affects the way we stand, walk and run. It affects the harmony in our body and our homeostatic systems. It collects the entire organic whole which is our body. It has an active phase-inhale, and a passive phase-exhale. But it doesn’t always fully relax. Sometimes it even starts to hiccup uncontrollably and it take a long time to relax its contractions.
So what can we do?
The key lies in understanding the idea of the accordion. For this you first have to understand that exaggerated abdominal collection will not allow it to happen. Our abdomen has to learn to stay in constant movement and we must learn not to stop it. Organ expansion and contraction is also relevant for the pelvic floor. Out body works like a piston, rising and expanding and then dropping and contracting. This movement is possible thanks to the diaphragm, that moves like the round parachute that kindergarten children wave up and down. Our pelvic floor trampoline moves in reaction to the diaphragm’s movement. Both expand outwards as air comes in and contract inwards as air gets out. Both must not be held constant, nor the ribcage or the naval. Breathing must be a moving process. The diaphragm has a wide movement range, the pelvic floor, a narrow one. So given the limited movement range in our pelvic floor, we must attain full control of our breathing mechanism and reduce how much we contract our openings.
So I ask you to relax your abdomens. Don’t reach full relaxation, just remove any unnecessary contraction caused by the activity of your “I” from all sorts of reasons like self-image or thinking it keeps your back safe. I stated above that your autobiography is a limiting factor to diaphragm movement and I will now elaborate:
A woman. She starts to understand the meaning of femininity as she hits puberty. Up to this point she is natural. Her movement is natural. Puberty doesn’t only step in according to biological parameters, a lot of it is environmental. There is a specific moment when a girl becomes conscious of her surroundings. How it usually happens? She gets a sharp, mostly offensive, remark from someone. Her body contains the sentences she heard behind her back in class: “Did you see her breasts?”. This sets of a series of internal struggles which culminate in abdominal contraction of her childish belly and starvation, hoping her pelvic bones are seen through her jeans. The journey of “correction” has begun. This is a generalization yes, but I am sure most of you can relate. Every morning, after getting organized, standing in front of the mirror and getting dressed-we start collecting our abdomens- collect our personality into hiding, fitting in and erecting a wall to ward off the sentence “look how fat she/he is”. Several years afterwards you meet me and I shout “release your abdomen already!”. The fact that you are moving without the internal content of your torso is hard to accept. It’s very visible. I find it incomprehensible, and it causes pains and dysfunctions. Many of my students experience significant abdominal relief and ease of digestion problems or swelling that were going on for years. If you have a problem with the shape of your abdomen there are other ways to acknowledge its beauty. You can start, after learning to release, by looking at what comes in and what goes out of it, basically learning to inhale and exhale. To move as an organic whole. In parallel you can start running to build yourself a huntress body and start using training accessories to sharpen yourself up. Treat your body as a temple of consciousness.
Your body is a perfect musical instrument. If it isn’t, there is something in us that hampers its perfection.
Let return to applicable explanations: Your chest cavity is made of a ribcage that contains an air filled balloon similar to a birthday balloon, inflating as air comes in and deflating as air gets out. This is its regularity and it can only fill up by muscle and skeletal movements. It can’t fill up by itself (a balloon is passive). Better control of the muscles meant to expand the balloon will enable us to use it fully. The abdominal cavity is a liquid filled balloon, and as such it moves and changes shape according to movement of the tissues (connective tissue, our abdominal muscle layers, ligaments, muscles and bones) around it and it even sounds liquid (in abnormal situations it swells from within from over eating, fermentative abdominal bacteria, general and biomechanical dysfunction). So, inhalation of air to the chest cavity forces the abdominal balloon and shapes it to fit our skeletal posture-meaning how our skeleton is positioned during the exercise. It’s an amazing mechanism that enables our body to internally expand, elongate and introduce space into the joints. Your chest empties out and contracts in exhalation and fills up and expands in inhalation. Unfortunately, most of us only breath into the upper part of the chest, to the shoulder and neck area, which causes problems to occur. The breathing becomes poor and doesn’t develop during practice. Breathing should be three-dimensional, increase body volume up and down, front and back and to the sides. It has to be steady and fit the movement range from start to finish. Remember that week when you were sick and coughed uncontrollably? Did it get to a point when you were in pain all over from all the contractions? Did you ever feel a sharp pain in the side of your body during running? There are many examples, including acute and chronic back strains, that are related to this magnificent mechanism.
During optimal breathing, which is composed of inhale, pause, exhale, pause, the body facilitates movement in several areas: In the upper chest cavity-on the back side in the rib area; The sides of the ribcage (sideways breathing); The sternum goes up and down; The central and lower abdomen and the pelvic floor. You can also observe breathing that is assisted with accessory organs-shoulders, back, neck especially, and lower back. The latter three join in when we need to augment our chest movement to allow a faster intake of air, like when crying or hyperventilating, and with breathing limitation caused by various pathologies and extreme postural effects. You must experiment with breathing movements in all of these areas in your own body. During practice we need to be able to move in all directions according to posture and breathing instruction. We will mostly inhale during movements going from the center outwards, which create length (wide, open movements); and exhale in movements going towards the center from the outer areas (concentric movement). This regularity might change because inhalation always causes expansion, and there are exercises in which we want to increase the inner volume using air intake by concentric motion. I also mentioned earlier that breathing is composed of four “stations”. The pauses between inhalation and exhalation are very meaningful. They are a vital teaching tool, helping our body to adjust its content by movement. Every pause causes augmentation. If I initiate some movement-I can use the pause to holistically expand and bring more tissue into the posture (depending on the posture’s relation to gravity). If the movement is closed, staying in it will increase contraction in the body, create movement in deep tissues and organs against or with gravity (depending on the posture) and create a squeezing effect. In any case the rhythm of movement will be identical to the rhythm of air going in and out. A-c-c-o-r-d-i-o-n.
I also instruct student to observe the four stage process of inhalation pause exhalation pause, and dwell in every stage, during the final past of the lesson, when we observe our body. This enables me to accurately describe what’s going on:
Inhalation is the intake of air from another being. A process of acceptance. The first pause is where we contain this property. Do you feel comfortable here? I ask. Then let the air come out naturally. Exhalation is giving to another entity (exhaled air is not waste you have to dispose of). A pause ahead. What it feels like to be empty. You are an engine of love. Your body carries it. Your life starts with inhalation (when you leave the womb), with acceptance. It ends in exhalation, in giving. Every breath is a life cycle in itself, unique and with nothing like it. This notion develops thoughts about childhood, adolescence, maturity and old age. Life in functional change. The transition from receiving to giving. I wish it could always be this way.
Nose or mouth?
Nose inhalation definitely has many advantages. Temperature regulation, humidity, antibacterial properties and particle filtration. But if you find it difficult switch to the mouth. If you can control air outtake through the nose you don’t have to use your mouth as long as enough air comes out and you feel the core expanding and contracting during practice.
The amount of air and the sound it makes is very important. Breathing through the tips of your nostrils can be problematic and limiting. It also creates vacuum in the ears. You can breathe through the nose and augment the amount of air coming in by directing it down to the oesophagus and vocal cords to create a deeper sound.
In exhalation make sure you create, from the same place and with an open mouth, a deep, long AHHHHH and let all the air come out, until you feel the abdomen come into action. Don’t make a sound with closed lips like you are blowing your nail polish dry! Remember, a-c-c-r-d-i-o-n! It means that the feedback for excellent breathing is internal organ movement, rather than just external envelopes.
You might feel dizzy in the beginning. Don’t worry. Let your blood flow and alveolus adjust. If you find out your breathing is wrong (by practical exploration, not reading), I recommend taking some lesson to balance your breathing mechanism and movement with a breathing trained teacher, and augment the ranges of your breathing apparatus. It’s a muscle like any other muscle and you can build and improve its flexibility and strength. I also recommend reading about breath anatomy and start a steady self-practice routine. Get it into your daily ritual list or replace it with another ritual if your private time is short.
