Mnemonic Breathing

起吸落呼，開合有度

Rising while inhaling, dropping while exhaling; opening and closing (will be) balanced.

蓄勁如開弓，發勁如放箭

Gathering strength is like drawing a bow; releasing strength is like shooting an arrow.

Directional breathing, even though a large part of one’s training from the beginning, is not often mentioned in old practice sayings, maybe because of its versatility. Indeed, from the simple need to find proper relaxation to have the body form the right angles or even tense it, inhaling and exhaling can both be used as powerful mnemonics. The issue for modern practitioners remains, of course, that such respiration was meant for 24/7 training. The chances of reaping some benefits when only training as a hobbit are quite meagre. Still, since it held such importance in old practices, it remains worth introducing.

As just mentioned, directional breathing serves at least three purposes: finding deep relaxation, posturing and tensing.

I. Deeper and Deeper

Everybody knows how to relax and exhale; it’s probably the most common directional breathing. But for most people, stress leads to shallow inhaling, if not even making someone unable to catch his/her breath. Old internal arts are about learning how to achieve total relaxation, whether breathing in, out or even in apnoea, as it has already been introduced when not described at length in the present blog. Still, just as a reminder:

- One should start learning by emphasising the relaxation reflex a long and calm exhalation produces.

- Then, to understand how to relax while inhaling, it may be helpful to study our yawning process and pandiculation, i.e. stretching while yawning. Further in the process will come the double relaxation, pandiculation then breathing out while searching for a longer stretch and deeper relaxation. Finally, leaving pandiculation and learning how to retract lax muscles¹ while inhaling and stretch them while exhaling, an application of the second quote.

- At a later stage, one will stop pulmonary breathing while remaining relaxed by using the organs in the same way it is done for cutaneous breathing, as described in the previous post.

The link between breathing and putting the body in a certain state understood, one can contemplate how to apply it to force a posture.

II. Opposite Directions

Both quotes indicate how the body should react when inhaling or exhaling. They represent, of course, just some avenues of research. What we should understand is that, for those who trained 24/7, athletes used breathing as a tool to force some motion or some angles on the body until the process became unconscious. 

The first step seems easy. While inhaling or exhaling, one will automatically put the body in certain angles, like, for example, tucking in the butt while inhaling, stretching it upwards while exhaling.

But this process goes a bit further and may become a bit complex when considering whether one breathes in or out through the nose or the mouth. Just doing one instead of the other can have very different impacts on the body. But this subject involves a lot of complexities and warrants its post. Just to give an example, shortly: exhaling through the mouth relaxes us, a process that almost everybody knows. Doing the same through the nose, though, constitutes a ‘locking’ process.

Finally, breathing in and out will steer the body in opposite directions, as a whole or for some parts. That is why the famous principle 沉肩墜肘 (sinking shoulders and dropping elbows) refers to exhaling while inhaling should follow 浮肩昂肘 (floating shoulders and soaring elbows). Only then can the body become alive and fluid, not stuck in only one posture.

All these processes stem from an underlying one, finding tightness through relaxation.

III. Tensed But Lax

Because old internal practices aimed at creating tension, mainly through fascias for external power, the idea is also to ask different parts of the body to go in opposite directions. For example, having the legs float while breathing in and sink while breathing out while the butt tucks in then stretches upwards.

Following the theory of the Feminine and Masculine Principles, the idea is to put, as described in the second paragraph of the previous chapter, the body in opposite directions to create tension. Still, this goes even further, as one has to come to realise once his/her body has been remodelled enough that tensing the body has to come from as lax as possible muscles. 

Such a process seems, indeed, counter-intuitive at best, if not at all impossible. The first reason, of course, concerns an insufficient transformation of one’s body (see sarcomeres and the Golgi tendon organ in the previous post). A stick and a rope differ in flexibility and, as a result, in motion. In the same way, a hardened tight muscle body cannot move the same way a tender muscle one does, and vice versa. Once transformed enough, it becomes a question of having the muscles relax as much as possible so that they will stretch as far as they can. This will indirectly have the fascia do so. Then, the stretched elastic matter will naturally become tense.

Mnemonic breathing involves complex, versatile methods to deeply transform the body on a long-term basis. Unfortunately, it mainly caters to people who can train 24/7 for a couple of years, leisurely training is not enough. Internal arts went even further: they used respiration to produce and improve one’s vitality.

1. Once one has greatly transformed their muscles through stretching, as this blog has described many times, he/she can acquire the capacity to retract them. This is often referred to as one of the cotton skills, i.e. actively obtaining the same result on the muscles when one presses cotton or a sponge. Because of the muscle/fascia structure, this move is very subtle, almost not noticeable and very hard to achieve.