August 2019 – Tool of the Month – Breathing as if Your Life Depends on It
August’s Tool-of-the-Month is a kind of exploratory/diagnostic one, not so much intended to change something about your experience. But it’s pretty cool, because what it does is help us realize (in our own embodied experience) that there is a difference between reacting to someone’s, or some part of ourselves’, demand, and taking it as a request. We generally have no idea how much of our power and self-control we give away routinely, until we start to see this connection—between request and response—is not fixed.
Breathing as if Your Life Depends on It
“I’m not here to tell you what to do with your mind. I’m here to tell you what your mind does with you.”—Adyashanti
The tool for this month is not so much a regulatory device, one that helps to influence your own state up or down, as an exploratory one. I.e., more of a microscope than a wrench. Specifically, this breathing tool intends to help you look at the difference between treating what your mind and body tell you to do as a commandment, versus treating them as a request. It comes (or at least I learned it) from a Russian martial art called Systema, in which strong sensation—conventionally known as “pain”—is regularly used for increasing self-knowledge. Especially with pain, we can feel that we have no choice but to comply, essentially, with, “Get away from the pain as fast as you can!” But as strong as that demand may be, at the end of the day it is, strangely enough, merely a request.
Ok, so the tool goes like this (and, of course, if you have any medical issues, or are dealing with panic attacks, don’t do this, or consult with your doctor first):
Sit somewhere comfortably (like a couch, not a moving car…), then breathe in a really full breath, and hold it. Just that, holding the breath and waiting. Notice how the pressure increases internally, and perhaps warmth grows, or other sensations arise. Keep holding. Notice how slowly (or maybe not so slowly for you) part of you will start getting nervous, expecting the regular pattern of releasing the breath. Keep holding. This part will likely start protesting, start telling you, maybe with words, but certainly as an experience of urgency and fear in the body, that you really need to breath now. Keep holding. Notice how it increases, and here’s the crux of the exercise: see how long you can hold the breath after the point where your body tells you you’re going to expire (literally, “outbreath”, i.e., die). Then take a big breath and come back to normal.
(If you want to push yourself and magnify this, then breathe in a big breath, and then breathe it out fully…and then a bit more…and then a bit more. Then repeat the above exercise in the same way.)
This is an experiential exercise in the principle that just because someone tells us something, does not mean we have to do it. Now, usually externally, with other people, we can grok that pretty easily. “You told me to do the dishes, yes. But that doesn’t mean that your wish is my command!” But internally, especially around survival threats, it seems like we just have to comply: if something in me says there’s a threat and I need to react, then that’s what I need to do. Sometimes that’s certainly true, but even there, if we can convert that threat into something we consciously know and respond to, we can be substantially more effective in responding, rather than reacting.
This is particularly relevant to depression, which makes categorical and concrete demands of us all the time. “Life is pointless, and therefore you need to just resign yourself.” “You are a worthless human, so therefore you need to just comply with the boss.” “You are tired, and therefore you can’t do anything else but sleep.” The point of this exercise or tool is to challenge, at a visceral level, the otherwise fused connection between an injunction and an action, to teach our minds that just because someone, or some part of us, demands an action, does not mean that we have to, automatically and thoughtlessly, comply.
