Use Your Breath to Change Your Life
And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
—Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
We have shown you many of the ways that breath practices can be used to reduce the adverse effects of stress on your emotions and on your physical health. Breathwork can help relieve symptoms of everyday worry, anxiety, insomnia, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, or physical injury. It can be used alone or as a complementary treatment that fits seamlessly into any therapeutic plan without causing side effects. And beyond improving stress resilience, breath practices can restore your sense of being genuinely who you are, of knowing what you feel, of recognizing what others feel, and of being able to experience deep and meaningful connections with people, with your values, and with all that is.
Breathing can be used for more than just healing injuries or solving problems. You can also enlist these techniques to help you achieve peak performance in all aspects of your life, including work, school, creative and artistic activities, and athletic performance.
Peak Performance through Breathing
What does it take to be the best one can be or to do the best one can do? Whether your goals are academic, athletic, artistic, or interpersonal, focusing your efforts and harmonizing your mind, body, and spirit will elevate your performance. Notice that we are not talking about being better than everyone else or being the best in the world. We are focusing on being the best that you can be with both your strengths and your weaknesses. Everyone has talents, but just wanting and trying are not enough. If you have honestly and consistently tried to reach a particular goal but still feel that you are not doing the best that you can do, it is possible that something is holding you back.
Breath practices can relieve the anxiety and tension that interfere with performance in any arena. They promote better integration of the mind, body, and emotions, enabling artistic expression to flow and optimizing physical movements to conserve energy and reduce wear and tear on joints, muscles, and tendons. And finally, the regular practice of Coherent Breathing or Resonant Breathing has been shown to improve circulation, oxygenation, and endurance.
Performance Anxiety
One of the most common blocks to achievement is anxiety and the tension it causes. This is as obvious in sports as it is in the performing arts. The basketball player who tenses up at the last minute is unlikely to sink his shot. The musician whose arms and shoulders tighten up will deliver a stilted performance. Every student knows that test anxiety can make the mind go blank. Learning to dissolve anxiety by breathing slowly, smoothly, and evenly can go a long way toward improving performance in any field of endeavor.
Disconnection or lack of integration can also impede performance. Smooth, efficient actions require awareness and coordination of the mind, emotions, and body that includes both the performer and the instrument or the athlete and the sports equipment. The skier must be one with the skis just as the pianist must be one with the piano.
Wisdom from a Concert Pianist
Zita Zohar is an internationally renowned concert pianist. Through her years of coaching professional musicians and aspiring performers, she has developed a deep, intuitive understanding of the physical and emotional blocks that can interfere with performance. She has applied her knowledge of musical performance, neuroanatomy, and mind-body concepts to rehabilitate injured musicians as well as to enable performing artists to overcome blocks and to perform at their best.
Ms. Zohar is a master teacher who believes that breathing is intrinsic to musical performance. “All music tries to emulate the human voice and a voice needs time to breathe,” she notes. “Both language and music are organized internally through breathing. Since both speech and music have phrases and pauses, breathing is essential to musical communication. If the performer is too nervous and stops breathing properly, the underlying message becomes unintelligible.”
Ms. Zohar finds that nervousness is inherent during public performances. When musicians learn how to use slow, paced breathing while practicing and before starting a performance, the breathing serves to organize the brain and the body to move in tandem with the musical message. She encourages students to use Coherent Breathing for five to ten minutes before practicing their instrument. Many are overloaded with work and at first they feel they don’t have much time for the breathwork, but it is difficult for them to refuse to do just five minutes. The students soon discover that those five minutes improve their concentration and the quality of their playing, but they need more, so they gradually increase their breath practice time. After about six months, many of them do the breathing for twenty minutes before each practice session and prior to performances.
A twenty-three-year-old music teacher named Emily had been studying with Ms. Zohar for two years. Although Emily had been playing piano since the age of six, she still felt anxious before performances. Sometimes her hands shook, engendering a fear that she might lose control of her performance. At Ms. Zohar’s suggestion, she attended a Breath~Body~Mind workshop in February 2011. Emily later summed up her thoughts about incorporating breath practice into her musical life:
One of the greatest changes I feel after breathing and meditating is a sense of renewed energy and clarity of the mind; as if I’ve woken up from a deep and restful sleep. Sometimes it is possible to lose track of time when meditating, as my mind goes into another state. After a good breathing and meditation session, I’m able to practice for longer sessions more effectively without getting tired of repetition, an inherent aspect of practicing. After a particularly restful meditation, I feel more centered and calm. When I feel calmer, the music flows better and I feel like I’m so much more emotionally connected to the piano, more focused and able to keep the goal I am trying to achieve clearly in my mind. The music becomes more expressive. The next challenge is that with continued meditation practice, I will be able to achieve this “knowing calm” not just during practice, but also during performances.
According to Ms. Zohar, antiquated systems of teaching neglect the incorporation of correct body positioning and breath training. Body tension and incorrect positioning can result in injuries such as carpal tunnel syndrome and dystonia, a painful condition of chronic excess muscle tension and spasm. The methods to prevent and correct such problems, especially when teaching children, need to be improved to include the support of the entire body both in practicing and in public performance.
The rate of injury of musicians of all ages is being recognized as a significant problem, and there is increasing acceptance that changes are necessary. The realization that each movement should produce the desired effect efficiently and with the least physical strain brings to the fore the importance of the relationship between the musician’s stress, her body, and her instrument. When people are under stress, their breathing becomes shallow and their shoulders tend to go upward. This creates tension and changes the alignment of the body with the instrument such that the body is not properly supported, leading to fatigue, strain, and impaired performance. A musician’s use of Coherent Breathing can alleviate tension and enable the shoulders to stay down. At the same time, the body thus becomes more grounded. The optimal use of all available support, not only the support of the torso by the chair but also the hands touching the instrument and the feet resting on the floor, enhances the focus and control of the performance.
Resistance Breathing with Coherent Breathing helps relieve the high anxiety that plagues many performers. Students gain confidence once they realize that they have the ability to control anxiety by using breathing techniques. Ms. Zohar incorporates breath practices with Feldenkrais techniques, which focus on the relationship between physical movement and thought, mental awareness, and creativity (www.feldenkrais.com). The integration of breathing and body movements, along with their effects on the musician’s interaction with the instrument, is particularly helpful for performers and students who have become disconnected through years of misguided use of their body. Ms. Zohar observes, “When used properly, the human body has incredible capabilities to participate in creative efforts. It is possible, using breathing techniques and Feldenkrais, to restore the natural synergistic connections between the performing artist’s body, the musical instrument, and the creative process to produce an artistically worthwhile statement.”
Music performance anxiety, which occurs in about 25 percent of musicians, has a strongly adverse effect on the entire spectrum of musicianship, including the general physical and emotional well-being of musicians as well as on their career choices and quality of performance.1 Although nonprofessional music students face less pressure, they can still be vulnerable to similar anxiety-producing forces. Tens of thousands of students take music lessons or participate in school bands and orchestras. Most are expected to perform solo as well as in groups. By increasing understanding and awareness of the effects of stress and anxiety, parents, teachers, and students can develop more effective coping strategies using movement, breathing, and meditation techniques. This would help to reduce strain and injury as well as anxiety. Without fear or anxiety, the musician can be freed to enjoy the art of making music—and the same potential for freedom from anxiety applies to all creative and performance arts, such as dancing, acting, painting, and writing. Coherent Breathing, Resistance Breathing, and Breath Moving can remove obstacles to peak artistic performance.
Anxiety and Athletics: Two Sides of the Coin
Athletes striving for a peak performance are certainly familiar with the fine line between excitement and anxiety. Some level of manageable anxiety stimulates adrenaline and heightens alertness for competition. However, when anxiety becomes too intense, it can undermine athletic performance by creating excess muscular tension, impairing fine motor control, and causing shallow breathing. For peak athletic performance, we recommend twenty to sixty minutes per day of breathing at five to six breaths per minute and ten to twenty minutes of similar breath practice just prior to sports activities. This will prepare the muscles with an ample supply of blood and oxygen from the very start of the action. It will also help to control interference from excess anxiety or tension. This is an effective way to remove obstacles to peak performance.
The average person can hold their breath for three to four minutes. Hypoxia refers to an insufficiency in the level of oxygen in the bloodstream. Hypercapnia refers to an excessive level of carbon dioxide in the bloodstream. When the oxygen level drops too low or when the carbon dioxide level rises too high, sensors called chemoreceptors tell the brain that the body needs to take another breath, but training with slow-paced breathing can reduce the sensitivity of chemoreceptors to hypoxia and hypercapnia. The result is that the person is able to comfortably tolerate lower levels of oxygen without feeling the need to take another breath as quickly. Intense exercise consumes oxygen rapidly, exposing body tissues to low levels of oxygen. This can lead to tissue damage unless the oxygen supply increases or the need for oxygen decreases by reducing the intensity of exercise.
There are many situations in which it is advantageous to be able to tolerate hypoxia and hypercapnia. Here are just a few.
1. Deep-water divers can learn to hold their breath for up to seven minutes.
2. Musicians who play wind instruments can hold their notes longer.
3. Singers can keep singing for longer periods of time before having to pause for breath.
4. Athletes can increase endurance and keep playing longer before feeling short of breath.
5. The body can recover faster after exercise.
6. People skiing or hiking in the mountains are less likely to develop high-altitude sickness.
High-Altitude Performance
To study the cardiovascular effects of high altitudes, an Italian professor of cardiology studied a group of professional mountain climbers who practiced breathing at six breaths per minute one hour daily for two years before attempting to climb Mount Everest, whose peak is at 29,035 feet (8,850 meters) above sea level. The cardiologist, Dr. Luciano Bernardi, compared the performance of those climbers with that of a group of professional climbers who had not practiced the breathing. Dr. Bernardi found that climbers who did the breath training reached the summit without auxiliary oxygen and with a respiratory rate of only ten breaths per minute. In contrast, the other climbers needed to use oxygen tanks and struggled to breathe at the peak.2 In general, people use only about 20 percent of the surface area of their lungs, that is, the inner surface that lines the alveoli, the millions of air sacs that exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide with the bloodstream. The climbers who had practiced breathing at six breaths per minute for a year were able to use 80 percent of the surface of their lungs, the maximum possible area for oxygen exchange. Since they were able to extract much more oxygen from the air with each breath, they could take in an adequate amount of oxygen by breathing more slowly.
Dr. Bernardi made an additional discovery about the effects of paced breathing on peripheral circulation. Muscle strength and endurance depend on robust circulation to supply oxygen and remove lactic acid. Lactic acid causes muscle pain, cramps, and, if prolonged, damage to muscle tissues. Slow-paced breathing can increase circulation, oxygenation, and removal of toxic byproducts such as lactic acid. Dr. Bernardi found that a respiratory rate of six breaths per minute caused the capillaries (tiny blood vessels) in the hands and feet to dilate, resulting in maximal blood flow to the extremities.
You don’t have to be a professional mountain climber to benefit from paced-breath training, as one of our friends discovered. Janice and her husband loved adventurous vacations. A few weeks before traveling to Colorado, Janice took our Breath~Body~Mind workshop, but between then and her trip she felt too busy to practice Coherent Breathing. At the last minute before leaving for vacation, however, she tossed a Respire-1 CD into her backpack. On her second day in Colorado, while staying at a resort about ten thousand feet above sea level, she became ill with a throbbing headache, dizziness, nausea, weakness, and lethargy—classic symptoms of high-altitude sickness. Somehow, through her brain fog, she remembered the CD, dug it out of her backpack, popped it into her CD player, and slowed herself down to five breaths per minute. Within half an hour she was feeling better. For the remainder of their vacation, Janice used Coherent Breathing every day to prevent a recurrence of the high-altitude sickness.
Golf: A Game of Nerves
Golf is one of those games that require intense mental concentration and simultaneous physical relaxation to perform smooth, powerful, accurate strokes. Too much anxiety and the golfer will tense up, throwing off his or her swing. Tom had the talent to become a pro golfer, but whenever he entered competition, his anxiety would rise and ruin his game. Finally, he sought psychiatric help. During Tom’s second visit to Dr. Gerbarg’s office, she taught him some slow Resistance Breathing exercises to use whenever he was waiting to step up to the tee. Tom found that the breathing practice kept his anxiety in check, allowing him to play at a level consistent with his real abilities. He succeeded in qualifying to be a pro golf instructor and to enter the tournaments that were crucial for his career. He said a thankful good-bye at his third and final visit, then headed south for his new job as the golf pro at a beautiful country club.
Warrior-Healers and Athletes
People who participate in contact and combat sports inevitably experience major and minor injuries. In traditional martial arts, warriors are trained in techniques to reduce the risk of injury as well as ways to quickly repair whatever damage occurs. Intense breath training is an essential part of this preparation because it increases strength and endurance and sharpens the awareness that is necessary to counterattacks and evade blows.
BREATH PRACTICES IN AIKIDO
Aikido is a Japanese martial art whose primary purpose is spiritual development and the restoration of harmony in the universe through the use of qi, the life force. The concept of aikido is that when someone attacks they disturb the harmony of the universe. By countering or neutralizing the attack, aikido restores the harmony. Training includes many hours of physical exercises, meditation, and breathing sessions using different rates and intensities. Advanced practitioners learn to breathe as slowly as one breath per minute. Dr. Brown has studied aikido for twenty-five years with Sensei Imaizumi and became an aikido teacher at the fourthdan level. At that level breathing is used to develop enough endurance and situational awareness to fend off five attackers at once. Trainees also learn to use a very deep, loud, sharp shout to prime their bodies for sudden strong movements. This training came in handy one summer when Dr. Brown was called upon to help clear some land by throwing fallen trees into a ravine. Each time he lifted a heavy trunk, he let loose with a mighty shout that soared out over the lake below as he flung trees over the cliff into the chasm. The other men on his crew were impressed, and they quickly learned how to use his technique. The men were up there all day, shouting and heaving. That evening after they returned for dinner, the phone rang. Apparently their shouts had carried for miles and miles, all the way across the lake, terrifying the residents and tourists. Fortunately, their job was done and from that night on no shouts disturbed the peace of the lake.
QIGONG MASTER ROBERT PENG
Qigong training has many physical and spiritual dimensions. When the qigong master Robert Peng (whom we already mentioned in chapter 5) was training with his Shaolin master, he was given the choice of developing his skills for combat or for healing. Although he chose healing, he also trained in many techniques used to fortify the body. Among the skills he acquired, Master Peng developed the ability to focus enough energy through his fingers to generate electrical currents, which he uses for healing. Another skill he teaches is to increase “guardian qi,” energy that increases the body’s resistance to illness or injury. For example, using this energy, the body resists being pierced by sharp objects and when it receives a hard blow, no bruise will develop. Master Peng teaches many different breath practices including a kind of Resistance Breathing in which the breath is moved through partially clenched teeth and Longevity Walking, which synchronizes Breath Counts with walking. Those who are interested in such techniques can read Master Peng’s account of his life, Qigong Master: My Life and Secret Teachings,3 and visit his Web site, www.robertpeng.com, for his schedule of workshops and a list of his training DVDs.
We have seen that breath practices, especially Coherent and Resonant Breathing, remove obstacles such as anxiety and muscle tension, enabling creativity to be expressed and flow more easily from artists through their instruments. You will find that the regular use of breathing practices can improve your level of mental, physical, and artistic performance. By reducing tension, alleviating anxiety, and improving blood flow and oxygenation, breathing practices enhance speed, accuracy, strength, and endurance.