“For breath in life, and if you breathe well you will live long on Earth.” –Sanskrit Proverb
How we breathe determines how we experience the world. The breath nutrifies, detoxifies, affects every cell in our bodies, thereby governing how we feel, age, and deal with illness. The breath is literally everything. It’s said that you don’t know what you have until it’s gone. When it comes to the breath, we don’t even know it is there, until it’s not, and then we panic because we’ve never been taught how to breathe. I have developed a technique called SItStandStroll, a revolutionary technique that allows one to connect to the power of the breath.
Take in a slow deep breath and notice what is happening. Do not change anything about the way you are standing or breathing and od not concern yourself about whether or not what you are doing is correct. If you are like most people, your face and neck muscles are the first to engage as you simultaneously draw in your stomach, lift your diaphragm, and expand your chest. This is FaceBreathing.
As with all chronic dis-ease states. The negative effects of FaceBreathing are not immediately apparent and take decades to manifest. Try standing up and then taking two or three deep FaceBreaths. To understand the difficulty you will experience when you get older, allow your shoulders to slouch in an exaggerated fashion while bending forward at your waistline and then take a few more FaceBreaths. Notice how your breath is restricted by your upper body and your chest physically gets in the way. Now, walk in place for a few steps and then add the “old age” element—releasing your shoulders and bending forward at the waistline—and experience, first hand, how it becomes increasingly more difficult to breathe and walk at the same time when you are hunched over. It saddens me when I see my elderly patients struggle down the hallway bent over their walkers and canes. Many cannot come to the office anymore because they are bedbound due to their deteriorating body structure. What is even more disturbing is that this suffering is preventable as our bodies fail in a very predictable fashion. FaceBreathing is a chronic dis-ease with serious implications.
The solution to FaceBreathing is the BodyBreath. As infants and toddlers, we BodyBreathe instinctively, cultivating a healthy, grounding energy glow that allows us to not only stand, but to navigate on the earth without a second thought. The irony is that we start our BodyBreathing; FaceBreathing takes over later in life.
I remember how exciting it was when my daughter was taking her first steps. We would go to a nearby park, which she loved because there were always lots of dogs. She would pull herself up, step one, step two, eyes focused on her feet, and then she would see a dog, Bam! She would lose her concentration and fall on her butt. Luckily, she thought this was funny. Over time her gait improved, and the dogs became a help rather than a hindrance. She would stand up, see a dog in the distance, put her head down, and motor her way over there. She still could not look up however, because she hadn’t yet mastered walking and thus needed to focus her attention on her feet to keep from falling. This was amusing because, more often than not, when she arrived at her destination the dog was gone. She would look around, find another dog, and start again. She did this over and over until walking became second nature, which meant she no longer needed to think about walking; she could just walk. When we no longer need to concentrate in order to remain upright and walk, we become FaceBreathers.
You may wonder, if we are born breathing in such a healthy way, why would we ever give it up? This is due to what we call HabitEnergies, or practices routines that have been integrated in to our lives, for better or worse. Because they have been so deeply entrenched into our beings, to live any other way feels awkward, as if something is missing. This is why unhealthy HabitEnergies are so difficult to break. FaceBreathing is nothing more than another HabitEnergy.
BodyBreathing is the foundation practice of SitStandStroll that will not only counteract the postural problems caused by FaceBreathing, but also set the stage for the prevention and reversal of coronary artery disease establishing a new, healthful HabitEnergy.
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