How We Breath with Robert Litman of The Breathable Body

Transcript

welcome everybody nice to see you all here today to talk about the relationship between breathing and health it's a little bit about me I'm Robert lignan I've been teaching breathing for close to thirty years started in 1988 doing some body work the Duggan French approach to somatic pattern recognition was my first introduction in the lineage of doctor Ida Ralph and working with people in their ability to be able to have the capacity to breathe and how I really deeply got into this work was that I had a daughter who's now 50 who was a severe asthmatic and I was very concerned for her health as a father would be many trips to the hospital and gave her books and diets and things and nothing really ever worked and then I found out about a method called the potato breathing method in the early 2000s and went to study in New Zealand for five weeks and a year-long program working on reservations there and learning more about breathing my my knowledge about breathing is cumulative over many different modalities continuum movements particular breathing and also I just finished to getting a certification as a breathing analyst from the Graduate School of Sciences and health in Wyoming so my lecture today and experiential piece is an accumulation of all those places that I've studied plus my own body's ability to breathe I often think of myself as a guide teaching people how to pay attention to their own breathing and that breathing is actually the teacher if you are able to tune in then you are able to find out more about how your body is working with breath and how you feel about breath and what you know about breath of what breath wants to teach you it is really basic your teacher I find that the two most important things about breath that we want to pay attention to are the connection to your breathing and therefore to yourself so when you're connected to your breathing and you're connected to yourself as well and the other one is the sense of continuity so I thought just so we can get a little bit of experiential and it will take two minutes for you to kind of close your eyes I'll do the same you and just use your attention to follow the movement I'm not interested in whether you breathe right or wrong because that really puts a restriction on your ability to breathe as soon as your body thinks you're trying to make it work in a very particular way it becomes really difficult to breathe so mostly what I'm interested in is your relationship to the movement of your body and the movement of your breath so you're developing a quart of a sense of intimacy with yourself by following this most essential process so let's just take two minutes here close your eyes and just follow movement movement of your breath as it comes in right at the tip of your nostrils breath is right under your nose it's not something you have to reach out for very far it's right under your nose and you can probably feel as your breath comes in there's a change in the volume inside your lungs and as a result part of your body starts to move to expand to accommodate that change in volume and pressure just asking yourself here what are you being told what are you being shown what kind of meaning you make up about what you discover here you know ask for answers from you and we come out of this it's always interesting for a community of people to just breathe together I'm taking about 30 more seconds and you're ready so slowly let your eyes drift open and just even notice as your eyes drift open and you take little bites of light coming in then it has an effect on your breathing everything affects the breathing in our atmosphere we have three gases 78% nitrogen 21% oxygen and point oh three percent carbon dioxide we all know do we not that we're talking about climate change and what is causing the climate change to happen it's an increase in the carbon dioxide levels so just that small little percentage of increasing in the carbon dioxide levels is causing huge global change all around the world some things are colder some things are hotter some places are windy or some places have more rain more snow but there's disturbances and they are natural disturbances but they don't fit into how we live our human life the same thing is true inside the body body is made up of oxygen nitrogen and carbon dioxide if one of those gases goes off then our breathing goes off and everything in our body that is dependent upon healthy respiration starts to malfunction so in terms of your health and your breathing if your breathing is not balanced properly then different things can happen inside of your health but we are born breathing in on our inhale and we die going out on our exhale life and death at both ends of that cycle every breath we take in our lifetime 20,000 of them a day is a fractal of a life into death we breathe in you could say that we are becoming manifest from the inspiration so in most cosmologies if you look at how the world began and how people's begin it's always God blowing blowing breath into the first human to bring him alive so every time we breathe in we are becoming manifest it's a moment of creation it is to be honored it's sacred it's like taking here I am once again in this life force enjoy having a moment to enjoy what is here in this moment and as I begin to breathe out that moment is disappearing and as I breathe out and his arm and said as I'm hanging out at the end of that exhale I don't know if I'm gonna take another breath do you know if you're gonna take another breath does anybody know if you're gonna take another breath it's taken for granted and so many people we know don't get that get that breath the next time around and they didn't even know that that was coming so to take breath in that in that vein of how sacred it is I think bring drives a little bit more curiosity to what is going on and how we can value the ins and the outs because the other piece of that's really a great lesson that breathing has taught me is it everything comes and goes we often think in our life that this way it's the way the situation is now is always going to be this way and it doesn't because it always changes and it always changes by how you're breathing and how you feel on that inhale and how you feel on an exhale the design of our interest in presence like you do like when you go back into your body and you feel the breath is that I come out of fight and flight I come out of freeze I'm here with what's really here right now our imaginations have gotten so evolved that it's not just about whether the saber-toothed tiger is coming out to eat us it's whether the imaginary saber-toothed tiger is coming out to eat us and the nervous system doesn't know the difference between what it imagines and what's real so if we can come back to what do I really feel right now what's here right now my breathing well then I am present to my breathing and I'm no longer in that conversation about fight and flight but there is also a mechanism in the body that triggers the fight-or-flight and its mouth breathing so if we just sit here and just notice a couple of things three good and good you're on arm and no mouth open on that you're fast learner thank you that's a good way to practice that when you're really working about not bringing three a mouth when you're yawning you keep your mouth shut so we're always so alright so just in this position that you're sitting in just breathing in through your nose quietly just noticing the movement again back to how your body's moving with breath and looking at the state of that nervous system like Sarah said you know more relaxed Megan said just getting quieter inside yourself does it induce a little bit of parasympathetic response or a little quieting when you're paying attention to how you he's moving and breathing and when you get a feeling for the effort and for the design of the nervous system is it anxious or is it relaxed just take a couple of breaths in and out through your mouth and watch what happens in your nervous system and then go back to neuro nose breathing and saying what happens there you go back and forth and then when you have some answers for yourself just look up so I know you're done and we'll have a little talk about that what do we notice feels terrible and can you be more specific about what feels terrible about it okay okay and your nervous systems you know so you know we could say if we were actually doing something that we needed to be activated we're activating the nervous system but most of the time it starts to put us into our thinking body and it creates a bit of fight-or-flight so if a grizzly bear would still walk into the door what would be the first breath you would take and that would just trigger off everything you would you wouldn't care about how pretty the building is anymore your vision would get really narrow your heart would race your body might sweat your digestion would turn off your immune system and get overactive and you'd be in full-on panic fight-or-flight the the thing about the grizzly bear with fight or flight you either could play dead but it's not the moment to get present except to what's happening there but it is the moment to fight or flight or freeze and so it really serves that but in an everyday basis it really doesn't serve that so you trigger your own fight-or-flight by using your mouth for breathing so gonna be careful about that so this is a way I like to come into into having a breathable body I find that the body really knows how it wants to breathe and one of them is no MERS I think out there in the breathing world is when people are told to breathe into an area and I think it causes a tremendous amount of frustration because people don't always know how to breathe into something so in my and I in my asking the breath what about that it says no I don't want you to breathe into this I want you to breathe with this so when I find that on the exhale when you're breathing out if you follow how your body is sending up in impulses of sensation at the bottom of the exhale one will linger in your mind one place in your body will linger in sensation and so that's that I consider that an invitation for the inhale at that place that is lingering in my awareness I want to breathe with that awareness of that place when I take my next inhale and I want to notice that that place has some movement now and then the next exhale I want to see is it the same place that my body's interested in moving or does a different sensation arise somewhere else and I breathe with that sensation and if I did that as a practice over time more and more of my body is beginning to become engaged in the movement of my breathing and so I'm beginning to open more and more for breath I don't have to force it my body showing me breathe with this area and more of you will breathe and the more of me that breathes the less effort I have to use to get breath in so I see that you're quiet I see that some of you are actually doing this now so I just want you just want to see how that feels to you can you report a little bit if you're ready to yeah so I will so when you breathe out as you're breathing out as the exhale is leaving you there's a sort of the dissent that Helen spoke to and you're starting to feel yourself more in the relationship to gravity a place in my body sends up a signal just it draws my attention my awareness goes there because my awareness went there I want to breathe my next inhale with awareness in that location I'm considering that a signal from my body that says I need some movement that comes with breath in this area it's being held too long and I noticed oh yeah breath just followed where my awareness was so what I felt right off the bat was oh across the back of my shoulders up here I just noticed when I did that to speak to you and I noticed the spreading in my shoulders then I have brings out again shoulders dropped now I kind of feel it and they spine between my shoulders so now I'm just gonna keep that in my awareness and now that's moving and so I feel the whole lifting going on in my inhale that wasn't that was nowhere Oh before so the information that it comes with me paying attention to my body and feeling my body in so many different ways brings me into my current experience of me being in my body and the more of me that has to go through the process of receiving the movement of breath the slower I breathe and it's not so much that it's longer I'm just waiting for all of it to be included in in the phenomenon of in and out so my experience over time has been sort of an analogy analogous to meditating and looking through a candle and the idea of looking in a candle when you're meditating is eventually go through the eye of the needle and the whole universe opens up to you and so this process of just traveling your sensations and breathing with sensations eventually will turn into oh my gosh I'm not breathing anymore my body is breathing me the conversation between me breathing my body and my body breathing me this is the road to allowing my body just to take its own breath and me being totally out of the way because more of it is it's not being held it's being allowed to move with breath and the more of me that moves with breath and the more of me that is nourished by the movement of breath the healthier my system is it's in a relaxed place it's being nourished by oxygen and it's being nourished by movement so there's a unity and a continuity and a wholeness to it that breath is inviting by being touched everywhere so it's being touched by breath from the inside out