To gain the most advantage from your internal practice one should learn the 3 R’s.

Regulate the breath

Regulate the body

Regulate the mind

Regulating the breath

The practice and thus skill of regulating the breath is fundamental to many internal arts such as yoga, meditation, qigong and taiji. Notice that I used the word regulate and not control.

Regulate -
1.  manage, order, adjust, arrange, dispose, conduct, set, systematize

The concept of control sometimes brings with it a predisposed friction that often leads to confrontation whereas “regulate” has more of an acceptance and positive reinforcement aspect to it. We do not want confrontation and force as part of our practice. Instead we want things to be free flowing, yet guided towards a positive outcome.

Right now my class is focusing on just two breathing techniques. Post-natal (abdominal or Buddhist) breathing and Pre-natal (reverse breathing or Taoist) breathing. The choice of technique is determined by the result we wish to achieve. In either case the player must learn the breath. What I mean by this is, one should become intimate with all aspects, benefits, limitations and rewards of each technique.

As an analogy we’ll interchange breath with “vehicle”. If we need to get from our home to the grocery store we could take the family car and everything would be just fine. However, if we were in the process of moving to a new house, we might be able to move most of our stuff using the family car (over a hundred trips) but it really isn’t the smart way to go about accomplishing our goal. The same holds true for breath work. One might be able to achieve a certain result with Buddhist breathing but in reality Taoist breath would speed up the process considerably, resulting in reaching the goal much more efficiently.

Thus we need to learn about different breathing techniques and then we need to learn to take advantage of what each technique has to offer.

When we properly regulate the breath we maximize the potential benefit of any technique. Proper regulation does not allow for extremes to occur which often result in awakening the “monkey mind” or an adverse bodily reaction such as dizziness or fainting. So to avoid extremes use the 70/30 rule. Try never to exceed 70% of any physical limitation, lung capacity included. Nor should we exhale to any point that will burden the peaceful flow of the breath.

Regulation also necessitates the co-ordination of the breath with the body and any movements (forms) that are being performed. The breath drives the movement and thus, if the breath is laboured the movement will surely suffer. 

Next time – Regulating the Body

Peace

Rod