Master (of bad habits)
I was recently at a dinner party and the subject of health came up, as it often does with groups of people of a certain age; I’d say anywhere over 50. One man, at the head of the table, spoke of his interest in Qigong, and ancient Chinese practice that combines movement, controlled breathing, and meditation to promote the flow of Qi, or energy, through the body. He said that he’d recently learned a technique from alternative medical doctor Andrew Weil that he called the 4/7/8 breath. It entails breathing in for a count of 4 beats, or seconds, holding or pausing the breath for 7 beats, or seconds, and slowly exhaling for a count of 8. This 4/7/8 breath, which he intends to incorporate into his Qigong practice, is a stress reducer, an antidote for anxiety and a sleep enabler. It made sense, particularly the combination of specific breathing patterns with specific movements. Finally, I asked him ‘why’ this particular breathing pattern worked. He couldn’t explain it. Not exactly, just that it relaxed him, and that was good enough for him.
Good enough?
Maybe, and maybe not.
I recall, some thirty years ago, when I studied Shotokan style karate with two great Japanese masters. The traditional method of teaching was that the student learned from repetition, until the purpose of some of the more subtle movements became clear, an intuitive understanding. Taking years of practice to decipher the meaning or application of these ‘hidden’ techniques that were included in the katas, or forms, and many more years of practice, under the eyes of a sensei, to be able to make use of them.
Perhaps this works in traditional martial arts, encouraging attention to detail and fostering the spirit of perseverance, along with an intuitive understanding, but breathing is a different matter. There is no sensei monitoring your daily breath, and if repetition makes the master, repetition also re-enforces mistakes.
Mistakes that become fixed patterns, so by later life, somewhere past the age of fifty, and sometimes before, many of us have become masters of bad breathing habits, like mouth breathing, awake and asleep; leaving us short of breath, snoring, suffering bouts of apnea while using the upper chest, not the belly or lower abdomen, which means the diaphragm or ‘breathing muscle’ goes the way of all muscles that are underused; it loses strength and tone, as lung volume diminishes and a flight of stairs becomes a real challenge.
