Takeaway: Instead of thinking your way out of stress, breathe your way into more ease, power, and openness.

Humans can live weeks without food and days without water, but only a few minutes without a breath. Yet many of us forget to breathe, hold our breath, shorten our breath, or go through a whole day without ever noticing one single breath cycle. Breathing is an innate and autonomic bodily process, and you’re doing it—whether you’re consciously trying to or not—approximately 23,000 times every day. That means you have more than 20,000 opportunities every day to shift how and what you are receiving and what you are releasing. Simply paying more attention to your breath has the power to attune your presence, activate your aliveness, and generate a sense of empowerment.

“This is the first, the wildest, and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.” —Mary Oliver

Growing Your Breath Wisdom

Notice and feel yourself breathing for a moment. Begin by noticing the breath entering your nose. Is the air cool or warm? Feel your breath moving down your trachea and passing down your throat. Feel the gentle lifting of your chest as your breath circulates deeper into your body. Can you feel your diaphragm making room for the increased air by pressing down and out? Or perhaps you can feel your ribs responding and flaring out laterally as you continue deep breathing. Is there any movement in your upper, middle, or lower back as you breathe? Notice how and if your belly responds to your breath cycle. Does your inhalation reach and expand into your belly? Is your belly soft or hard? And notice how quickly or slowly you let the air go, and if you let all the air go or hold some in. 

Research has revealed there is a link in the brain between breathing and pain. When people feel pain, they tend to breathe shorter and faster. Furthermore, the simple act of conscious breathing can change how a person thinks, moves, and feels. More research shows that “diaphragmatic breathing plays a role in functional movement. Inefficient breathing could result in muscular imbalance, motor control alterations, and physiological adaptations that are capable of modifying movement.”

Your Peace, Power, and Presence is One Breath Away

Establishing any conscious new habit, like a modified breathing practice, has the power to improve the unconscious movements, patterns, and habits that have led to pain. If you are currently experiencing pain in your body, we invite you to get curious about that pain through your breath. Take a deep breath and exhale a friendly and audible “hmm” as you ask yourself, “What can this pain teach me about how my body wants to move or be still?” Inhale and exhale “hmm” as you breathe in and out this question for several cycles. Simply feel yourself open to the possibility of understanding your body more. 

Many breathing practices have been developed over centuries by practitioners from around the world, but there is one practice that has stood out for us that we feel moved to share with you. It’s a breathing practice developed for modern humans in modern times: the decompression breath as taught by Foundation Training founder Eric Goodman, DC. Practicing the decompression breath daily has revolutionized the way we experience our body from the inside out. Specifically, it has helped us unshackle from general pain or discomfort we experienced as “normal,” and instead created a more integral structure that supports everyday movements at and away from the table. Decompression breathing has also become a reliable touchstone to shift away from fatigue, procrastination, and complacency. 

Decompression Breathing Origins: Foundation Training

Foundation Training is a system of movement therapy devised and evolved by  Goodman in response to the ineffectual allopathic approach to the insidious, chronic pain he was experiencing for years. The decompression breath, along with the tenets of “anchoring” and accurate “hip hinging,” form the tripod upon which Foundation Training rests. It has become a fundamental practice for Heath, who uses it daily. Together, we believe decompression breathing is a missing linchpin in most yoga training and core-strengthening practices, and has the potential to help shape-shift the alignment of the spine. Heath’s chiropractor can attest to the positive benefits years of decompression breathing have had on improving the alignment of Heath’s scoliotic curve. 

Complacent Versus Active Adaptation

In Goodman’s latest book, Foundations of Health: Harnessing the Restorative Power of Movement, Heat, Breath, and the Endocannabinoid System to Heal Pain and Actively Adapt for a Healthy Life, he points out that many (if not most) people become passive in their approach and relationship to chronic pain, fluctuating stressors, and debilitating immobility. Folks passively wonder, “When will this be over?” or “Who can help me?” or the particularly troublesome question, “Why is this happening to me?” Though these questions point to resolving the matter, they don’t generally lead to significant, dedicated action to resolve the underlying challenge. Or if action is taken, it often includes becoming more passive and dissociated from feelings of discomfort by distracting ourselves with food, drugs, entertainment, etc. This diversionary tactic is known as “complacent adaptation,” which relies on us becoming less aware of how our thoughts and behaviors are contributing to our present state of wellness or disease.

Decompression breathing offers an alternative approach to being passive. Rather, it provides a reliable way to embody “active adaptation,” the intentional practice of engaging and evolving with the ongoing and ever-morphing varieties of stress in our lives. With more repetitions of any active adaptation practice, we generate more resilience in our nervous system, our thoughts, our feelings, and our relationships.

With more repetitions of any active adaptation practice, we generate more possibilities within our nervous system, our thoughts, our feelings, and our relationships. In fact, intermittently getting active helps prime the pump on our manifestation capacity and is a reliable catalyst for getting things started or done. Trying getting active with your breath. And if it feels good to you, add it to your personal self-care toolkit.

Decompression Breath 101 

Here’s a brief explanation of decompression breath. In a sitting, supine, or standing position, place your hands on your abdomen, palms down, with your thumbs contacting your lowest ribs and your pinkies touching your hip bones, otherwise known as the anterior superior iliac spine (ASIS). Inhale as you fill your rib cage and try to expand the space between your hips and ribs. As you exhale, draw your navel point in toward the spine. Feel your core engaged in an attempt to maintain that increased space and length you’ve created on the next inhalation. Repeat 3–9 times.

Especially pay attention to breathing and filling air into the back of the rib cage, behind and around the shoulders, as well as the lateral flank of your torso. On each inhale, attempt to fill more air into your rib cage in a 360-degree way, and on each exhale, attempt to sustain the length between hips and ribs.

Creating a 360-degree expansion and elevation of the rib cage while simultaneously lengthening and strengthening the stabilizing muscles in and around the torso and spinal column provides more mobility and space in the rib cage laterally and vertically. It also provides for a special type of spacious engagement called pandiculation. 

Pandiculation

If you search for the medical definition of pandiculation, you’ll find something akin to “a stretching and stiffening especially of the trunk and extremities as when fatigued and drowsy or after waking from sleep.” If you imagine a dog or cat taking a big yawn while stretching, you may begin to get a sense of what pandiculation is. Or perhaps you give yourself the gift of a generous, good morning stretch when you wake up and you feel your body simultaneously contract and expand. However, unlike our furry friends who pandiculate approximately 40 times per day, most people barely get one or two in per day. Voluntary pandiculation can regulate and alleviate stored tension in the body and strengthen internal structures. The decompression breath is a voluntary practice of pandiculation by weaving together the seemingly opposite forces of muscular expansion and contraction.

Change How You Feel by Changing How You Breathe 

The benefits of decompression breathing are cumulative and exponential and truly flourish with a dedicated practice. This practice improves your movement patterns and teaches you how to simultaneously notice the qualities of engagement and spaciousness within your body. By simultaneously lengthening and strengthening the tissues and structures around the diaphragm, as well as the joints between the vertebrae and rib cage, we leverage and coordinate mechanical and physiological movements with great ease. With this conscious breathing exercise, we not only optimize functional movement but also up-regulate our autonomic nervous system so our bodies, minds, and hearts become inoculated to future stressors.

Many of us, as well as our clients and family members, try to change how we feel with the strategy of doubling down on more thinking. Here’s a new possibility: Instead of thinking your way out of stress, breathe your way into more ease, power, and openness. Science demonstrates that consciously or actively engaging with your breath may change how you think, move, and feel. Short-circuit a stress response, calm your heart, relax into a stretch more deeply, and create more connections with just two minutes of conscious breathing. 

One easy action you can take to mitigate painful patterns in yourself is to embody the decompression breath a few times a week for a couple minutes. It will not only offer immediate and long-term benefits of actively adapting to stressors but also provide you with an embodiment practice so you can teach your clients and loved ones how to get unstuck from rigid pain patterns. Don’t let your next breath pass you by. 

Resources

Bradley, Helen and Joseph Esformes. “Breathing Pattern Disorders and Functional Movement.” International Journal of Sports Physical Therapy 9, no. 1 (2014): 28–29. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3924606.

Goodman, Eric. Foundations of Health: Harnessing the Restorative Power of Movement, Heat, Breath, and the Endocannabinoid System to Heal Pain and Actively Adapt for a Healthy Life. New York: Harper Wave, 2022. 

Hamilton, Jon. NPR.org. “A Brain Circuit Linking Pain and Breathing May Offer a Path to Prevent Opioid Deaths.” December 22, 2021. npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/12/22/1066011236/a-brain-circuit-linking-pain-and-breathing-may-offer-a-path-to-prevent-opioid-de.

Merriam-Webster.com. “Pandiculation.” Accessed September 2022. www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-day/pandiculation-2015-01-21.

Author’s note: In our previous article titled “Creating a Sensory Refuge,” we were remiss to reference the creator of the Basic Exercise (and practice we shared in the article) and where we found this technique. The book is called Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve, Stanley Rosenberg, North Atlantic Books, 2017.

Heath and Nicole Reed are co-founders of Living Metta (living “loving kindness”), a continuing education company now offering touch therapy tools and self-care practices in their online community. They also lead workshops and retreats across the country and overseas and have been team-teaching touch and movement therapy for over 20 years. In addition to offering live classes, Heath and Nicole are life coaches offering home study, bodywork, self-care videos, and online courses that nourish you. Try their community free for 30 days at livingmetta.com/trial.