EVERY BREATH YOU TAKE.....
The DIAPHRAGM - often likened to a jellyfish for it matches it in shape and action - dome shaped with a wave like movement, always in motion, always in flow.
In yoga we seem to have found so many ways to label our breathing, there’s so much on the internet telling us how to breathe. People out there telling us to breathe “diaphragmatically”, to “belly breathe” or that “chest breathing“ is bad. We blindly follow this believing that if we can be taught to breathe, salvation and enlightenment shall be ours. Yet in the same breath we call yoga non dualistic, we say that we are enough and that we are already there.........anyone else getting the irony here?
Folks did anyone ever have to teach you to breathe? Did you as a baby go to breathing classes? And what about your diaphragm? Does it only move on command? Do you have to instruct it to move?
Let’s stop for a moment & unpack these ideas.
Firstly let’s understand the anatomy of the diaphragm & how it’s linked to the breath. Your diaphragm is your body’s primary breathing muscle, in order to breathe this muscle has to move. It is located high up in the body, almost fully contained by the base of the rib cage. It is anchored to flexible and springy cartilage, crucially it is not attached to bone and it is this that gives it its floating action. All it needs is space within which to move.
And secondly breathing is for humans both a voluntary & involuntary response, in other words we can breath without even thinking about it & we can also bring our attention to the breath. Breathing happens in relationship to gravity and how we steer our breath is up to us. It’s kind of cool really.
So the suggestion that you need to learn to practice diaphragmatic breathing is kind of suggesting that you aren’t breathing. A suggestion that you are not doing something that you are perfectly and anatomically designed to do which is, in my books, a way to trap you. It is a dualistic viewpoint which unintentionally hurts us deeply. It’s dangerous through its perpetuation of our own lack.
Does this sound extreme? Maybe......but we have to stop putting out these myths as a way to pull people in. Because let’s be really honest with ourselves & accept that packaging up yoga in certain ways is basically saying “you are not enough & you need this practice to complete you”.
Yes we can argue that it’s possible to have a more efficient breath. It’s also possible that we can get stuck in patterns that do not serve us. But does that give us the right to tell someone that a fundamental aspect of their biology is wrong or not working?
Instead of telling people what to do and how they should feel we can simply allow people to pay attention to their breath, to the expansion and contraction of the body. When we pay attention we arrive at the here and now and through that we may see the parts of ourselves that we are ready to see or we may not, and that is fine too. Empowering ourselves with a simple curiosity about ourselves, so rather than a practice that follows any one ideology, how about a practice that simply allows you to create more space both physically and mentally. A practice that brings more attention to the process of breathing and allows you to observe the fluctuations of your own body and breath.
Of course the diaphragm is a muscle and like all muscles it can be strengthened so that it may work as efficiently as possible. But how to do that? Leslie Kaminoff explained this to me very simply. He said if a tiger were kept in a small cage with little room to move, over time the tiger would get weak. If you wanted the tiger to get strong again, would you give it some dumb bells to work out with or would you simply give it a bigger cage within which to move within? You decide.
However do you NEED to have a stronger diaphragm in order to breathe? The answer will always be no. So next time anyone suggests that you must breathe diaphragmatically you have my permission to remind them that you are breathing and your diaphragm is doing just fine.
“What can we do but keep on breathing in and out, modest and willing, and in our places? ”