Ascetic Embryonic Apnoea

習閉炁而吞之名曰胎息。

The practice of holding one’s breath and swallowing is called foetal breathing¹.

但能閉至七八十息以上，則臟腑胸膈之間，皆清氣之布矣。

But if one can hold one’s breath for seventy or eighty breaths or more, then clear vapours will permeate all the organs and the space between the chest and diaphragm².

One of the techniques one hardly witnesses any more, in what people still call martial arts, is the apnoea ones: holding one’s breath. It is even to some extent prohibited in some practices, cutting off one’s breath rightly seen as a nervous reaction linked to freezing on the spot. One should not deny that, faced with an assault, freezing and cutting one’s breath counts as a poor idea. As for a lot of issues in leisurely practices, it has then been decided that holding one’s breath is just bad. This goes against the old practices approach, where things neither fall under the category of good nor bad, but have to be confronted with one’s aims and situation. It boils down to assessment and whether the advantages outweigh the drawbacks. Finally, one can observe that predators tend to apparently freeze when they are poised to pounce. 

Pouring, Another Reverse Breathing

氣灌丹田

Vapours pours into the Cinnabar Field

吸自背下五端，呼灌於骨盆轉

Inhaling from the back down to the five extremities, exhaling to pour into the pelvis in a rotation.

Usually, people refer to reversed breathing, 逆呼吸法， as a technique where one expands his/her stomach while breathing out and shrinking it while breathing in. If such a technique, provided one uses a belt to keep the stomach from bulging, is a good start, it is just what we could name as the entry breathing, often called 'the vapours sink into the Cinnabar Field'. As mentioned in a previous post about breathing, one then has to evolve towards other types of breathing, the next one being not sinking but pouring.