Huh?

Breathing happens. Whether you like it or not, it happens. If your breathing doesn’t flow, you’re still breathing, even if you’re in the middle of an asthma attack.

That’s not where the problem lies.

The problem is that your breathing doesn’t feel right

Maybe you feel that you’re not breathing. So you try to breathe.
Maybe you feel that your breathing should be less like this. So you try to stop breathing like this.
Maybe you feel that your breathing should be more like that. So you try to breathe like that.

In every case, you’re trying to breathe and you don’t need to try to breathe because you’re already breathing.

If somebody’s already breathing, why on earth would they try to breathe?

The answer is: “Because it seems to them that, if they didn’t try, they wouldn’t breathe, or they wouldn’t breathe well enough”.

Why does it seem like that?

The breathing you get when you try to breathe is probably all you know. There’s never been a time when you didn’t try to breathe, except when you’re asleep. If you stop trying to breathe, even for a moment, your breathing changes. It becomes unfamiliar, your feeling tells you you’re not breathing. Quite likely, you begin to panic. Your experiment with not trying to breathe is immediately quashed. And, apart from that panic stricken moment, you’ve still no experience of breathing without trying. (Time spent breathing peacefully in your sleep doesn’t count because you don’t remember that).

You’ve still never left your breathing to do itself.

Once you get past that moment of panic and allow your breathing to do itself, you will find that you’re no longer breathing at all: your breathing is just something that’s happening to you.

It probably won’t feel right because it’s not what you usually do. But it will be. Maybe for the first time ever, it will be right.

So it isn’t your breathing that’s the problem. Your breathing never was, and never will be, the problem. It’s your trying to breathe that’s problem. What’s the solution?

Learn how to not-breathe

Until you start to not-breathe, your problem will remain:
You’re not not-breathing.

Not yet.       

So far so good. The problem is that most people squeeze their breath out forcibly. They pull their ribs down hard to breathe out. Doing this, they also drag their spine down, causing it to buckle — and they lose height.

Could this be part of your problem? Most probably, yes.

Starting from this shortened and buckled spine, what really needs to happen on your out-breath is for your ribs to angle in without dropping any further than they already have. If you really do that, your spine will be forced to lengthen up to accommodate your new rib movement. Your spine will push up just like a corkscrew lifts and pulls the cork out of a wine bottle when you squeeze the handles.

The result is that you gain height, breathe more freely and take oodles of pressure off your neck, throat and shoulders.

Try it.