Breathing, Complex and Evolving

睡則氣以耳出，名龜息，必大龜壽*

Vapours comes out of the ears when resting eyes closed, what is called the tortoise breathing, for certain the big tortoise lifespan 

人能依嬰儿在母腹中，自服内氣，握固守一，是名胎息**

If one can do like a baby in a mother's womb, taking by himself internal vapours, holding and protecting tenaciously the unicity, what is called the foetal breathing

鼻息無聲神氣守***
Soundless breathing through the nose, guarding vapours and spirit

Breathing is one of the most important things in life, thus the core of internal practices. Whatever he/she would do, an internalist was always about checking the impact on his breathing and heartbeat. Being a key issue made it also a complex one, it was not only about lungs, but also about heartbeat, skin, fascias, organs...
Hence, there was a vast multitude of breathing techniques with various goals, and describing all of them in details in one post would be almost impossible. Below a few examples of some avenues of research.

Lungs

Normal breathing, through lungs, apart from its obvious physiological function, had two aims for internal practices, it was an aid to relaxation and an ultimate way to check if one was following relaxation, use of fascias without any contraction and vitality over muscle power.

As described in earlier posts, exhaling slowly is a way to learn to relax. This first skill mastered, inhaling while relaxing would help the student to understand even more the relaxing process

Unstressed breathing is the ultimate way for any internalist to judge if he/she is going in the right direction. Panting, even slightly, would be a sign that one would be under stress, using muscle contraction instead of fascias elasticity for example. For internal practices, stress and/or muscle contraction push the heart to accelerate or decelerate in a non progressive way, erratically. It is a bit like pushing on a gas pedal slowly or just playing with it by pushing and letting it go. Because of the sudden contraction and then release, the heartbeat has to somehow abruptly accelerate and then decelerate. Since the breathing follow the heart, one then starts to pant. When using fascias elasticity, the body just have to extend itself and retract, always keeping the elastic tension, never contracted nor lax. The heartbeat may then still increase, but not erratically, and the breathing will be kept in check, never, even slightly, panting. Hence, originally the characters 息 for breathing and 喘, to pant, were opposed.

Skin

Cutaneous breathing is insignificant in humans, two percents maybe at most, but it still exists, and internal arts are all about increasing any capacity the body has or can have. Once the understanding of a regular breath through relaxation is understood, one can go on to improve skin breathing. Relaxation is very important because, in order to start to understand how to improve cutaneous breathing, one has to go through a stressful process involving the usual method of putting the body in opposite directions. To understand the technique one has to know that the upper part of 炁 (a latter character for 气, vapours), 旡, means to choke on something eaten. To improve skin breathing, one has to inhale as if something is blocking air down the throat and exhale in the same way. Air being prevented to go to the lungs while the breathing motion is otherwise maintained, the body will naturally try to breathe through skin.

This technique is hard because not only keeping air from going to the lungs is a process that automatically stresses the body, but also it can only be achieved if one has mastered at least the skill "mobilise the organs" (see Foggy Heart). Otherwise, one will just stop breathing and enter into apnea, which is the opposite of what is sought. Done correctly, one should try to improve breathing through the skin pores, hence the use of the term 納 for the inhaling process, because it originally meant something like moisten, moisten fabric. The idea is, indeed, to fill the body with air as one fills a piece of fabric with water to moisten it. 

息

As we have seen above, 息, breathing, and, 喘, to pant, used to be opposed. 

息 is made of 自 and 心. 自 originally meant nose, and 心 for heart. 喘 basically meaning to breathe fast or in an ill way, and 息 calmly, the latter evolved naturally in the added meaning of rest.

Using the sayings 心平氣和, "the heart is peaceful and the vapours harmonised", and 鼻醒氣, "the nose rouses vapours", one gets back to the fact that internal breathing is about the both calming and mobilising oxymoron, since breathing is all about the heart and the nose.

Tortoise and the Navel

In breathing techniques the tortoise is often mentioned, and not for its quite long lifespan but actually because it lacks a diaphragm and has to use the whole body to support its breathing process. Turtle breathing techniques can, thus, refer to skin breathing which also has to use the body as a whole to allow the skin pores to breathe, but also to internal breathing where condensation and heating concern all the organs and the lines of fascias and not the lungs alone. Hence the breathing technique called, 吞吐, ingurgitate and regurgitate, which in this case refers to the process of swallowing and vomiting in the body and not inhaling and exhaling.

Navel breathing, otherwise called foetal breathing, was also a way to find how to use the organs for internal breathing by replicating the inhaling and exhaling process through the navel. Done in a certain way, it was also a mean to a flat stomach and the link to what is often called kidneys breathing****.

Evolving

Old practices were mostly about transforming the body to acquire new skills (Transforming First the Body), and that new skills meant new principles (Method). Breathing being the core of internal practices, it was also evolving according to skills, meaning a lot of different ways of breathing, sometimes opposed in their principles. It was, of course and as described in 鍊, quenching and tempering, in Train, Refine, Temper, a question of when to do what. Or, as the saying goes, 練功要掌握火候, "to train skills one has to master the crucial moment". 

Indeed, one can be faced with different kind of techniques, from those where one pushes air in the belly while exhaling to the total opposite, from breathing in the belly, the kidneys, the middle of the back or the top of the back, from moving the diaphragm to keeping it locked up...

As it was described in the previous post, accumulating and compressing vapours do not require the same motion, once a skill is obtained, one has to go on to practice the one that follows. As for everything in this world, not evolving leads most of the times to regression and is accelerated by our natural ageing process. Furthermore, in breathing techniques you can find the difference between the filling up techniques, where one starts by inhaling and filling up (lungs, stomach)... and the emptying techniques, where one starts by exhaling and emptying, following another extended interpretation of 旡 in 炁 (a latter character for 气, vapours). Indeed, some considers that 旡 actually refers to 无, nothing, nonexistence. Following the principle "from nothingness comes existence..."*****, one would try to empty as much as possible his/her body by breathing out in a slow and steady pace. Then, naturally, the body would breathe in by itself. In other words, in those techniques, the breathing process will focus on exhaling, inhaling being just a reflex, quite the opposite of the way most people breathe, but actually in terms with the way Chinese normally describe the breathing process, 呼吸, exhaling and inhaling. But without any Cinnabar Field, 丹田, such techniques of emptying oneself were not efficient, and as it was developed briefly in Condensation and the Belt, Cinnabar Fields were created through the filling up breathing, a full circle and the second part of the saying, "..., existence returns to nothingness."*****

Of course, practicing as a hobbit, one should not go further than trying to breathe naturally and trying not to pant. Still, it remains interesting to know that breathing used to be quite an extensive field of study in the old days.



*Records from the Sesame Field, 芝田錄

**Cloudy Bookbag Seven Slips, 雲笈七籤
***Emei Taoist Boxing Song, 峨嵋道人拳歌
****Hence the link between the navel and 命門, the acupoint located between the kidneys in the back

*****無中生有，有還歸無