State Of Change
Photo: Staley
Breathwork has been a part of our practice for some time but it has morphed over the years and has recently taken a front seat in the way we see physiology. The difference was that before we used it as a sidecar to fitness problems, sometimes reminding someone to use some back pressure in an exhale or deep clearing breaths to mitigate the panic sensations after hard intervals or an intense circuit. We explored breathing ladders as a way to teach recoverability. We would use compromised resting positions or load-bearing rest to teach diaphragm control and conscious recovery, but the focus was more on the exercise, more intent on the movement than in the breath. And then we got kind of skeptical, defensive almost, as we saw the pageantry of “nasal breathers” float down from the Aether to bless us with their divine knowledge and dogma around their personal method or “protocol.” All of this just looked like the next round of Moonies. My assumption is that people that are selling are full of shit. Value is self-evident. And so marketing and sales pitches are decoration for money-making schemes. It sucks to admit that this natural reaction that keeps me safe from “candida diets,” magnetic healing, or the trend of wearing a gas mask to train “at altitude” sometimes closes me off to practices that I might benefit from.
Eventually, I acquiesced to traditional methods. I met a coach that took me through my first Pranayama session in 2015, and he didn’t try to sign me up for an MLM after so I understood that there is a way to do it without being a total douchebag. What I also realized is that our focus had been backward.
If you look back at our work and try to find the key ingredients that have allowed us success, you would see that the biggest consideration is not in the application of secret knowledge or techniques—we don’t prefer one exercise over another, or one diet better than another. We haven’t invented any device or movement that has revolutionized training or fitness. We merely address the state of the player. We apply stress or rest consciously, manipulating many variables, mostly physical, but some emotional and psychological. We aren’t looking at control per se, but rhythm. Finding a pattern so you can break the pattern.
The foundation for any kind of change comes through awareness of your state and eventually the various tools that allow you to change it. This happens by way of manipulating your nervous system, which can only happen by developing a sensitivity to your environment and recognizing the factors that affect you. Most of us found it accidentally through sport. The training to improve performance allows most to feel what it is like to not be in control of your state, through the pressure of competition, or the reaction from being insecure in your preparation (overtraining). The control of your state manifests as a wave that allows one to use stress and rest for superior conditioning (pattern), which often leads to altered states of consciousness (transcendental and flow states but also mind expansion—psychedelia, perspective shifts, and self-reflection become more clear). All of these states have tremendous power for revelatory insight, and we found many of them through exercise—or what you might call passive-aggressive breathwork. These are desired states but they remain elusive to the majority of our modern population.
It is ultimately more complex but we can think of states as “up or down,” stress or rest, or in the scientific vernacular: sympathetic or parasympathetic. An improperly tuned body or an unaware player is usually at the mercy of their environment. They are reacting as opposed to responding. To highlight how common this is, we use a general example:
It starts with an alarm clock wake-up, and the sleep cycle is interrupted by sounds that indicate an “emergency.” It is further pushed into a sympathetic state by caffeine, traffic, and the load of a work day, sprinkled with sugary foods that promote energy that should be used for immediate physical effort but instead are channeled into storage from inactivity. Perhaps you are one of the few that makes it to a workout for lunch, and through the guise of “health” partake in an hour-long HIIT session at your local box. The movement is a good attempt to channel the energetic foods that are easy to consume, and most will feel a temporary reduction from stress (mostly from an unconscious increase in breathing and a flush from moving blood and lymph around the body), but the intense nature of training, amplified by stimulants in order to feel “motivated,” is furthering your sympathetic response. By the time you finish work and drive home in traffic, all you can really do is try to eat dinner and tune out by watching some series on Netflix. You feel tired but wired. If you are like most, you will stay up later than your exhaustion hints at, and then the whole cycle starts again, only to find relief by sleeping in on the weekends, which is often attached to late nights out, excessive alcohol use, and even more inflammatory foods.
In cases like these, an attempt at improving health—like a new diet plan—generally compounds stress because it adds tasks to increase the level of awareness around an activity that is most often unconscious. Why is it so hard to remember what you ate throughout the day? Because you are usually in a state of unawareness in order to down-regulate for digestion. The same might happen with sleep because most correlate rest with unconsciousness, although there is a very big difference between rest and sleep—sleep can happen without being restful, and rest can happen without sleep. Without individual consideration, training often magnifies injuries and seeds new ones by adding acute stress to a chronically stressed organism. The frustration will build and people will become more incapable because they were never taught to understand what state is appropriate to balance their overall condition. You must deload a structure before you can repair it or make it better, but most approach self-improvement like repairing a bridge during rush hour.
What we try to do is understand the overarching nature of the individual. It isn’t that stress is “bad” and rest is “good,” it’s that unregulated states tend to compound and make it harder to change states when you need to. The sedentary become more sedentary. The stressed and overworked try and work their way out of stress. You can become accustomed or even “addicted” for lack of a better word, to states of emergency. This taps resources and desensitizes you to the need for rest and puts you at the mercy of your environment.
One of the easiest ways to alter, modify, or control your state is to control your breathing.
To start, breathing can be thought of in four parts, interdependent and in relation to each other: inhale, retention, exhale, and suspension. The most important consideration is the “in and out” as they regulate the exchange of O2 and CO2 in the most potent ways. In simple terms, more in than out means “up” as in sending the signal to uptake O2. This infers a “ready state,” or the preparation for stress. If you take a moment to take some very sharp, deep inhales one after the other, either through the mouth or the nose, using short sharp exhales, you can literally feel the adrenaline release as norepinephrine is secreted into the system. This is how you might prepare your body to lift weights, flee danger, or stand your ground against a threat. This is also why most training is considered a stress. The increased respiration (often unconsciously) has higher O2 intake than CO2 exhalation. The higher the ratio, the more acute the stress response and the higher the panic, as CO2 building up in the system is what signals a need to breathe.
Contrast this to elongating the exhale and keeping the inhales shorter in relation and tempered, and you have the start of what could be a down-regulation practice. Although it never seems to be good advice in the moment, when you are in a panicked state and someone tells you to “calm down” and “take a breath” they are suggesting this time-tested method. We refer to this as ventilation and it is superior to almost anything we have found at regulating a stressful state. Take a breath in and slowly leak it out for 10 seconds and you will feel an immediate relief of tension throughout your body. You can also force a physiological sigh and have similar responses.
When you watch the best in the world do what they are best at, you can often see them regulating their state, almost subconsciously. In tennis, it is a deep breath before a serve on a match point. In weight lifting it is the sharp inhale and slap on the back of the neck from a trusted coach. And in the extreme sport of breathe control, you will see free divers use a combination of exercises in order to prepare themselves to not only sustain their conscious state for minutes longer than the average person can go without air but to also deal with the unfathomable pressure of the ocean at depths that are crushing to our hardest metals. Watching professional fighters is an excellent way to watch a variety of approaches as some try to amplify their state and others attempt to down-regulate. There seems to be a variety of approaches until you get to world-class or the most experienced fighters who are on average more calm and better able to adapt to the situation.
Learning self-regulation starts by becoming aware of what your environment makes you actually feel like. We have been conditioned to be polite and to numb our natural reactions (civilized), but much of this process of regulation is about becoming in-tune with your natural expression and not blocking it. Often, the practice of regulation starts with trite experiences. It will start clumsy, because, like all skills, it takes time. The natural reaction to a passive-aggressive comment from a co-worker might be an equally passive-aggressive remark. This is a step in the right direction because it is better than repression which festers. Eventually, it may be answered with a direct remark or an honest statement about the root cause of the confrontation, which often has to do with an unregulated state of another, but is moving the confrontation with other to confrontation with self. This tends to escalate interactions until one can stop reacting and start responding—not to the person, but to the environment. It is normal when one becomes aware, that some interactions are not worth the energy of regulation. An old epithet becomes relevant here: “save your breath.” Becoming aware of your state moves you past the petty interactions and allows you to feel the overall energy of a space and the people involved. Real awareness is learning to feel a situation before it happens and to match the appropriate state of readiness. Navigating traffic is excellent practice for this, at first flipping everyone off and slamming your steering wheel at anyone who so much as looks at you wrong will eventually shift to a virtuous wave to the most irate drivers because you realize the cost of interacting with hostility that has no possible positive outcome.
Our practice now teaches regulation first. Upfront. It is the foundation for anything else whether physiological, psychological, or spiritual. The breathe—in many cases—has been made out to be mystical, and certainly, extreme state changes can lead to ecstatic experiences, but it is not our main use. The breath is a practical tool, a way to become more aware of your environment, your place in it, and an understanding of yourself.
Self-regulation is self-awareness in the practical and applicable form. Contrary to what you may have been sold, it is free. It doesn’t require a degree to master. You don’t need to be certified to start paying attention to it. And thankfully I didn’t have to join a cult in order to change my mind about its importance in my own practice.
