The way I breathe - by Andrew St. Jean

Recently, my teacher told me to change the way I breathe.

Now the proper way to breathe is something that you hear about a lot in the martial arts. It's used as a way to calm the mind. It's used as a way to relax the body. And it's used as a way to focus energy. I've been involved in Aikido for many years and so I thought that I had a pretty good understanding of what I should be doing as far as breathing goes. Apparently not.

I remember as a teenager, one day noticing the way I was breathing. I was breathing primarily with my stomach, my chest hardly moving at all. I decided that was a childish way to breathe and since I was older now, I should change. So whenever I caught myself breathing with my stomach I would make a conscious effort to breathe with my chest. It took a long time but eventually I started breathing that way out of habit. I was quite proud of myself for accomplishing such a feat, changing the very way I breathe.

Years later, I began taking Aikido classes. I was still doing my chest breathing. When I began Aikido I was already in fairly good shape as I had been involved in fencing for a number of years prior, so I was able to keep up with the class. Like everyone starting out in Aikido, however, my movements were very stiff and I found my mind racing from one part of my body to another. Is my hand in the right position? Am I doing the right footwork? What do I do next?

From time to time, my teacher would talk about breathing in general and how to breathe while executing a technique. It turned out I was doing it all wrong. I should be breathing with my stomach, using my diaphragm rather than my chest muscles, filling my lungs more completely and making the process of breathing more efficient.

So back to the drawing board I went and started training myself to use my stomach to breathe. It took a surprisingly long time to unlearn what I had trained myself to do as a teenager but eventually I brought myself back to where I started. And what did I find once I had accomplished this? It seemed to me that I had to expend less effort to co-ordinate my movements with my breathing. I eventually found that I could more effectively use my breathing to calm myself and I could recover faster when I overextended myself and became out of breath.

So for many years, I breathed in basically the same way, only refining what I was already doing.

But now I've been told I should make a fundamental change in what I'm doing. I've been told to do something that contradicts what I've been taught in the past and, perhaps more importantly, my own experience. I've been told to breathe through my nose.

Where I first encountered this precept is lost in the mists of time but as far back as I can remember, I understood that the proper way to breathe during any sort of strenuous physical activity is to breathe in through the nose, and out through the mouth. In through the nose, and out through the mouth. It's something I've always done. It's become one of those things that is so familiar that I don't notice it. It's become part of the landscape.

And here I was being told that I should stop doing that and breathe in and out through my nose. When I was first told to do this, I didn't understand how I was going to manage. Surely I wouldn't be able to get enough air into my lungs to sustain myself. I'd run out of breath in no time at all.

And that's exactly what I found. I'd become winded very quickly and I'd end up having to take great gulps of air to make up the difference. I didn't understand what this was supposed to get me. How was this going to improve my practice?

But rather than abandon the effort, I decided to take it one step at a time. I've been doing my best to breathe through my nose realizing that, like everything else, it will take time to learn. The biggest hurdle I have had to overcome in this process has been to put aside my expectations of what could or should happen so that I can be free to discover what does happen out of this change in my behaviour.

And I have discovered things. One consequence is that I am being forced to be mindful of how much energy I'm expending throughout class. Even with something as basic and fundamental to Aikido as rolling, I'm paying attention to what I'm doing in a way I haven't done in years. And I'm seeing an improvement. The improvement isn't great at this point, but it is enough to make me continue with the effort.

Ne waza is another area of practice that I've noticed has been impacted by this different way of breathing. Like a lot of people, I struggle with using too much strength during ne waza. I constantly catch myself falling into the old habit of using strength to overcome my partner rather than taking the time to feel what's happening. By breathing through only my nose, I can't afford to waste energy, or to struggle with my partner. I am forced to relax, to keep my muscles from supple, and to stay alert for the opportunities to reverse my partner.

Conserving energy, co-ordinating all parts of my body, feeling what my partner is doing so that I can respond appropriately, these are principles that I have known about for many years and that I have been reminded of many times. Now I am finding that I'm applying them in a way I haven't before. All this from something that, until recently, I had taken for granted.

This story illustrates one reason why I have been involved in Aikido for so long. It promotes looking at the familiar in a new way and learning something from the experience. So many aspects of our lives promote the opposite, that once we learn some fact or concept we can safely ignore it because it will remain pristine and unchanging. If it is worth making the effort to extend the habits developed in the dojo to other aspects of our lives, perhaps the most important one is the habit of examining our habits.

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