The Tao of Natural Breathing (9 page)

PRACTICE

1
Visualize and sense your internal organs

Sit in the basic sitting posture. Visualize and sense the location of each of your internal organs. As you attempt to sense your organs, use your hands when possible to rub or probe around them. Start with the easiest organ to sense: the small intestine (in the area of the navel). Then move on to your liver (on the right side of the rib cage), and to your stomach, pancreas, and spleen (all more or less on the left side of the rib cage). Then sense your colon, your large intestine. (The colon extends from the end of the small intestine near the right hip bone up the right side of the abdomen and loops around to the liver area behind the ribs on the right side of the trunk. It then crosses the front of the body somewhere between the sternum and the navel, loops around behind the ribs on the left side of the trunk, and drops down toward the left hip. Near the left hip it angles toward the center of the body and turns into the rectum.) Now bring your attention to your heart (more or less in the center of your chest), your lungs (on each side of the heart), and your kidneys (protected by the lowest ribs on each side of the midback). As you touch these areas gently with your hands, feel the muscles and tissues around the organs begin to relax. Spend at least a couple of minutes sensing each area.

2
Sense the outer movements of your breath

Next, put your hands over the lower part of your chest, with the bottom edge of each hand touching the bottom of the lowest ribs, and the tips of the middle fingers touching each other at the bottom of the sternum. This is the area where the front of the diaphragm is attached to the ribs. The center portion of the diaphragm is actually higher, approximately at the level of the nipples. Observe your breathing. See if you can sense which way the diaphragm moves as you inhale and exhale. Don’t use force. Don’t try to change anything. Simply watch and sense.

Next, put your hands over your navel. Can you sense any movement in your belly as you inhale and exhale? Now put your hands over the lower ribs on the front of your body. What movements can you discern on the inhalation? On the exhalation? Next, put your hands on your lower ribs on both sides of your body. What happens as you inhale? As you exhale? Now put your hands on each side of your lower back in the kidney area (just opposite your navel, around the second or third lumbar vertebra). Again, see if you can sense any movement as you inhale and exhale. Next, put your hands on your upper chest. Notice what happens as you breathe in and out. Be sure to include in your awareness any tensions and restrictions in your breathing. Give yourself at least two or three minutes in each position.

3
Go deeper into your sensation

Now, try the same practice again. But this time, let your attention go deeper into your sensation. As you sense the movements of your breathing, let yourself experience how your internal organs are influenced. Put your hands over the middle of your chest as you did earlier. Can you sense your diaphragm putting pressure on any of your organs as you inhale? Which ones? What happens when you exhale? Now put you hands over your navel. What happens in the area of your small intestine as you inhale and exhale? Next, put your hands over the lower ribs in the front of the body. Sense what happens in the area of your liver on the right side and your stomach and pancreas on the left. Continue on in this way following the same sequence as you did in the previous practice.

4
Include your emotions

Try the practice again. But this time include any sensations of warmth, coolness, dryness, or dampness in and around your organs. At the same time, take note of any emotions that may be present. Be careful not to dwell on them, analyze them, or judge them. Just include them in the field of your perception as you go on sensing yourself. It is as though you are taking inner snapshots of yourself through the wide-angle lens of your sensation—your inner organic awareness of yourself.

This is a foundation practice—one that you can and should return to daily. Later, once you become more proficient at taking inner snapshots of yourselves in quiet circumstances, you may find yourself quite spontaneously taking these inner snapshots when you are with other people. But be patient. Learning how to observe, through sensation, the interrelationships of your breath, tissues, organs, and emotions is a crucial step in both self-healing and wholeness. It will not only help make you more aware of the unconscious attitudes that create stress in your life, but it will also begin to free you from these attitudes. Most of the practices discussed in future chapters will build on this practice of organic self-awareness, and will expand on the ideas put forward in this chapter.

3

THE TAOIST VISION OF ENERGY AND BREATH

For the Taoist, the conscious cultivation
of breath offers a powerful way
not only to extract energies from the
outside world but also to regulate
the energetic pathways of our inner world,
helping to bring our body, mind,
and emotions into harmonious balance.

In many traditional cultures, breath is envisioned as a direct manifestation of spirit. It is the subtle energy of the spirit that “enlivens” us, and we receive this subtle energy by breathing it in or having it breathed into us from above. Terms such as
prana
(India),
pneuma
(Greece),
lung
(Tibet),
num
(the Bush people of Kalahari),
ruach
(Hebrew),
neyatoneyah
(Lakota Sioux),
baraka
(Islam), and
chi
(China) are just a few of the many names of this higher life force upon which we are said to depend. And it is through our own authentic breath that we can consciously connect with this life force.

Though Western science rejects any notion of a subtle energy or life force that animates us, it does, like many of the traditions, believe that we live in a universe of energy and energy transformations, and that we depend on these energies to think, to feel, to move, and so on. For the Western scientist, these energies—which include mechanical, chemical, electrical, radiant, and nuclear—are defined in relation to the “work” they can do. This work must, however, be measurable through the techniques of hard science, especially through instrumentation designed for that purpose. By definition, anything that cannot thus be measured does not exist. Of course, other researchers, including some in “softer” sciences such as psychology and psychiatry, have over the years posited the existence of subtle energies with names such as bioplasma, bioelectricity, biocosmic energy, and so on. And they, too, have often defined these energies in relation to the work they can do—especially in relation to our own minds and bodies. They have not, however, fared well in a society geared to the marriage of science, technol-ogy, government, the medical establishment, and the drug industry.

One of the most famous of these energy researchers is Wilhelm Reich. On the basis of much experimental evidence and personal verification by many people, Reich maintained the existence of a powerful life force energy which he called
orgone
energy. He began to show people how to use this energy to help prevent and fight various life-threatening diseases, including cancer. Since he viewed his work as experimental, he did not charge his patients. Yet the U.S. federal government moved against him, and in May 1956, in response to his refusal to obey FDA injunctions, the government sentenced Reich to prison, where he died of a heart attack in November 1957. While he was in prison, the FDA raided his institute and burned his books and other writings.
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THE REMARKABLE ENERGY OF CHI

It is only today, after the documented success of certain forms of “alternative medicine,” including meditation and Chinese healing arts such as acupuncture and chi kung healing (
chi kung
means
energy cultivation
), that a few open-minded pioneers in the Western medical community have begun to accept the possibility that there may be subtle forms of energy, such as chi (also written
qi
), that Western science has not yet learned to measure. The 1994 PBS television series and companion book by television journalist Bill Moyers,
Healing and the Mind
—which documented some of the latest breakthroughs in mind/body research by psychologists, neurologists, and immunologists—devotes a section to “the mystery of chi.” Moyers draws no definite conclusions from his experiences in hospitals and elsewhere in China, but he does admit to seeing “remarkable and puzzling things.”
²³

Since long before the birth of Christ, Taoist and chi kung masters have been experimenting with remarkable and puzzling things—with the subtle energies and functions of the body and psyche. Through their own personal practices with breathing, posture, movement, sensory attention, visualization, sound, and meditation, they have discovered how to beneficially influence not only our thinking and feeling, but also the various internal systems of the body, including the enzymes, hormones, blood cells, and other vital substances and energies that lay at their foundation. The effectiveness of many of these practices has been verified over the past two decades by chemical and biophysical research done by scientists in collaboration with respected chi kung masters in some of the top universities and laboratories in China—research that has shown the remarkable influence of chi on everything from crystals to the human immune system.

Chi and Negative Ions

Taoists and chi kung masters maintain that, in principle, we can all learn how to use chi to promote health and well-being. They believe, for example, that the process of breathing not only draws in the oxygen needed by the body to transform food into chemical energy through the flame of internal combustion, but that it also provides an entranceway and support for the various other energies that animate our being. From the modern Taoist’s perspective, for example, the discovery by modern science that the earth’s atmosphere is filled with electrical charges called
ions
is highly significant. Some Taoists have even gone so far as to identify negative ions with chi. Ions are either positively or negatively charged atoms or parts of molecules. Negative ions, which are tiny packets of almost pure electrical energy, are formed naturally by interactions of the sun’s energy with our atmosphere, as well as by cosmic particles, lightning, storms, winds, the evaporation and movement of water, and low levels of radioactivity coming from the earth. Thousands of scientific studies have shown that ions, especially negatively charged ones—those which carry an extra electron—are extremely important to our health. In commenting on research that was done in France in 1966, for example, one author writes that “in the lungs the presence of negative ions favors the passage of oxygen through the air cell membranes so that this oxygen is more efficiently absorbed by the blood. At the same time, the removal of carbon dioxide is also made easier.”
²⁴
And according to Robert Ornstein, Ph.D., and David Sobel, M.D., “Negative ions have been shown to increase brain serotonin, a neurotransmitter associated with more relaxed moods.”
²⁵