Breathing For Calm: A Short Breath Control Exercise From Feldenkrais Expert Emma Alter

How many candles can you blow out?

Moshe talked and wrote a lot around breathing and the breath. Let me share one thing to notice around the breath, if you’re teaching, but also if you’re talking to someone with a different point of view.

If someone is not breathing freely, they’re not organised for input. They’re not listening, and they’re not ready for learning. To integrate new information requires a sense of safety. Often on an unconscious or physiological level.

Where to start?

As usual, with ourselves. When do you hold your breath, or with whom? Even noticing when we stop breathing, and consciously starting up again is an important step in easing communication.

Using a Candle Breath to calm ourselves

Pretending to blow out a candle, is one easy way of slowing the out-breath, which is a simple way into calming your nervous system. Slowing the out-breath usually helps to slow down the breath in both parts of the breath. This can slow the heart rate, which in turn, can calm you.

A mistake many of us make around breath-control

Don’t interfere with your in-breath. Our nervous system will mainly see conscious involvement in the inhalation as a stressor. If you’re already nervous, it will only make it worse, even if you've been told to do it. Quite often, I find that our human physiology isn’t taken into account when offering solutions.

When we slow the out-breath it activates the vagus nerve, and turns on your para-sympathetic system, sometimes called the Rest and Digest part of the autonomic (unconscious/automatic) nervous system.

You’ll know that’s on if you hear or feel gurgling in your belly / digestive tubes. Anxiety and poor digestion are linked, after all. We have to feel safe to digest.

Try it yourself

Start by counting your in and out-breath. Just to measure your current baseline, not to judge or correct.

As you exhale, imagine you’re blowing out a tiny candle, gently and slowly. The resistance you add slows down your out-breath. Gradually, take away resistance.

Optimal breathing is the ability to breathe adaptably

We need to be able to breathe in a wealth of different ways. The physiology of laughing is very different to that of coughing. When you’re lying down, resting, you need a different breathing style to if you’re running.

The breathing pattern when we feel pleasure is very different to that of fear. It should be, our emotions use different patterns of breath. If you’re limiting the way you breathe to one "correct" way, it can lead to a lack of colours in your emotional palette.

Ideal breathing doesn’t have artifical pauses, but changes according to your situation. It allows you choice to breathe through the nose and mouth. In my classes, the focus is always on creating more options, rather than having only one way. This is the best way to do it. It’s anatomical. It creates choice for your unconscious to choose autonomically in the moment. It doesn’t fix you into only one “correct” way.