Right Breathing: An extensive training guide with many exercises, instructions and explanations

By Hiltrud Lodes

Can you blow out a candle from one-meter distance? Are you breathing properly? Through the nose? With the diaphragm? Do you admit the natural breathing impulses of yawning, sighing, crying and laughing? Do you breath out deeply enough? Do you give yourself a pause after exhaling? No? In this case you should find out more about breathing training and therapy.
A correct breathing training reestablishes the physical/emotional balance and is at the same time a successful means for improving numerous complaints, e.g. the respiratory organs, the cardiovascular system, the gastrointestinal system, as well as speech disorders.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Buch&media
• Release date: Oct 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9783957801050

Book preview

Introduction

»The air weaves the universe, the breath weaves the human individual«

Upanishad, Atharva-Veda

I wrote this book for everyone interested in the subject matter, especially however for my students and participants in my workshops and seminars. Its aim is to provide information about the basic fundamentals for sensible breathing practices, and to provide instructions for correct breathing. It also warns against hasty and excessive breathing training without adequate foundations and qualified personal instruction and supervision.

When used correctly and at the right dosage, breathing training provides physical and psychological balance, and is at the same time a therapy for many disorders, for states of physical and emotional tension and disharmony, for acute and chronic disorders of the respiratory organs, the cardiovascular system, the gastrointestinal tract, as well as for speech disorders.

I became familiar with the exercise examples in this book during numerous workshops and advanced training courses for respiration, relaxation and movement therapy that I had participated in, and some of them I developed myself.

In workshops and courses at adult education centres in and around Munich, in private workshops and seminars, as well as in elective physical education at grammar schools I was able to test many exercises and have selected those that proved to be especially appealing and effective.

I would like to thank all those people that shared their knowledge, expertise and abilities with me during my training and advanced education, and not lastly my students, workshop and course participants who all provided me with many valuable suggestions.

Hiltrud Lodes

Breathing is life – non-breathing is death

»The affinity between all forms of life is found in the breath«

Chinese proverb

Did you know that breathing is our most important form of nutrition and also communication? We inhale what is around us, and exhale what is in us. The breathing thereby creates the connection between us and our environment.

Breathing is giving and taking and is the exchange between the inside and outside that is indispensable to life. When this interdependence is disturbed, then the human individual also falls out of balance.

Our life on earth begins with the first breath of the newborn child and ends with the last breath of the dying. During the period in-between the breathing is a mirror of all physical as well as psychological impressions with regard to depth, regularity and peacefulness or agitation, outside just as inside.

For our body it is therefore all about the oxygen. Our life is absolutely dependent on the exchange of oxygen: without oxygen there are no metabolic processes, there is no life: we would already die after 5-15 minutes. Thereby our brain cells react even more sensitively than the rest of the body: they die already after roughly three minutes.

By contrast one can survive without water and liquids for at least five days, without food for fourteen days and longer, and 65 days and longer without sleep, as e.g. proven with the help of autogenic training of Dr. H. Lindemann during his ocean crossing in 1956 in a dugout canoe. We repeatedly hear about the astonishing feats of the hunger artists, and this not only in the novel of the same name by Franz Kafka.

In the area of breathing we hear much less of such feats of endurance: a Yogi was buried alive for 40 days and survived. A record diver swam a stretch of 90 metres without having to take a breath of air. In contrast to the fishes that extract their oxygen from the water through their gills, we are subject to death through asphyxiation when we are not able to take a breath of air under water at the right time.

We respond sensitively to lack of oxygen: we become tired, disinclined and ill. Gliders, mountain climbers and divers that want to reach higher or lower regions depend on the supply of oxygen through oxygen bottles or similar devices. Those living in a poisoned atmosphere will suffer from shortness of breath and are under threat of asphyxiation. During the second world war gas masks were used to defend against harmful toxic substances in the air, today in the large cities there are »smog-alarms« to warn the population in good time against poisoning. In contrast to this there is a »refreshing atmosphere« in the forest or mountains and we can breathe freely there.

Plants, which in contrast to humans absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen, thereby supplement us in an ideal way. For this reason it is so important to live in a kind of symbiosis with plants and to cultivate or maintain green belts or parks in large cities to improve the air quality through »green lungs«.

Not only the oxygen impoverished air, but also »the atmosphere« in the figurative sense can have the effect that »we gasp for breath« and we »run out of air«, as the physical process of breathing is connected with our emotional and subjective spiritual-mental life.

Those who breathe quietly and »persevere«, or can »let off steam« at the right moment are undoubtedly in a better position and condition than those who hastily and irregularly »struggle« for »breath« and composure and thereby experience blocking of the breath. Already 80 years ago the German psychologist Ernst Kretschmer (1888-1964) wrote that »respiration is more than just an exchange of gases«. Correct breathing also helps create and develop emotional balance, improves the blood circulation to our brain cells and helps to expand our consciousness, is the wisdom of ancient breathing cultures.

Breathing cultures and breathing training – in antiquity and today

In ancient times breathing exercises and breathing therapy were already known in Egypt, China, Tibet, Japan, India and other countries. The doctrine of breathing was regarded as a secret doctrine and could only be imparted personally by the initiated. The breathing exercises of ascetics, magicians and healers were not only passed on for religious practices like for the deepening of contemplation and meditation, but also for philosophical reflection and for healing purposes.

Different methods of breathing gymnastics, breathing therapy, conscious and unconscious breathing training, mostly in conjunction with meditation practices such as Tai Chi Chuan in China, Yoga in India and Zen Meditation in Japan were widespread throughout these cultures.

Currently in China (e.g. in Tangshan and Shanghai), Russia (the Crimea), Switzerland, Germany and numerous other countries there are breathing sanatoriums, where individuals with disturbed breathing, lung, heart and stomach disorders, patients with vegetative dystonia and neurasthenia, as well as damage to the spine can partake in intensive therapeutic breathing treatments, and are able to be discharged on completion with correspondingly good results.

As a deeply acting and supportive measure, breathing therapy can provide help for sickly or diseased people. However as a preventive therapy, breathing training can help many to maintain their health and balance.

This alone already justifies their necessity, even though we need to take into account that not everyone responds to the same method. Here we only want to become involved in breathing training.

Breathing and voice training are, like elocution training, closely connected. Those who train their breathing also improve their vocal qualities, and those who train their voice regulate and regenerate their breathing. In occupations involving a lot of speaking, too little work is done with the power of healthy respiration.

Especially for educators, specifically music and physical educators who are continuously engaged with using their voice and breathing and an exceptional load is placed on them, breathing and voice training are essential for vocational training and classroom tuition. Misguided uneconomical respiration and speaking not only strain the educators themselves in the form of vocal overexertion – a sense of not being able to get through or not being able to assert oneself – but also the students, who develop issues with »absorbing the material«. Conversely students as well as teachers are often unable to communicate their knowledge due to mumbling, and subdued and unclear articulation. Breathing and voice training should therefore be the foundation of all educator and therapeutic training.

Breathing correctly – but how?

»The breath is man’s best friend«

Ludwig Schmitt

There are numerous and also opposing opinions in specialist circles about the specific way of conducting breathing training.

Some are of the opinion that it is appropriate to deal directly with the breathing and to train it, but however not to name it specifically or bring it too much into awareness, because thereby it would then immediately be influenced and changed. Others in turn hold a certain degree of awareness during the work on the breathing as being indispensable.

I subscribe to the breathing educators, who during the regulation and re-establishment of the natural breathing pattern initially try to work as naturally as possible, i.e. who work through relaxation and release, through breathing stimulating and loosening movements, through nasal breathing and natural breathing impulses, and through contact with the partner, group and therapist.

To awaken awareness for the necessity of correct breathing I subsequently however consider it quite expedient to create the necessary requirements for this through objective information.

An expert can quickly differentiate between normal or defective breathing. Defective breathing can most often be corrected through physical and emotional relaxation and clarification. Conscious breathing training, like for example with Yoga-Pranayama (= breath regulation, mastering of the breath), is only appropriate when the natural full breathing flows automatically, and always balances itself easily after it has been changed through physical and emotional exertion.

Those who do not wish to cause injury to themselves should place themselves under the guidance of breathing therapists or other experts, before already tense areas become even more tense through misguided conscious breathing exercises that promote the development of defective breathing patterns or even increase any defective breathing pattern that may already exist.

Breathing training and psychotherapy often go hand in hand or supplement each other. Individuals with breathing problems also often have psychological problems. It would therefore be gratifying, if more physicians and therapists would address the specific opportunities contained in breathing training and therapy and would use these extensive methods more frequently.

The journey towards correct breathing – moving together and in harmony

»The first and foremost is the breath«

Buddha

»It may well be easy, but what is easy is difficult«, remarked Goethe, the famous German poet and philosopher. Many people are not easily able to comprehend that we first need to relearn how to breathe naturally again. The recovery of our natural breathing, where we fully inflate all respiratory cavities in the chest, sides and stomach area should be performed slowly, with patience and step by step. That which has been neglected or even spoiled during the previous years of life can not be restored in a few hours or days of exaggerated training and excessive therapy.

Our program would therefore be as follows: first we want to feel and experience how breathing takes place in our body, so as to then be better able to surrender ourselves to automatic breathing.

Then through becoming quieter and relaxing