Dear All,
I was reading an article in The Economist (see link below) that reported on studies, including one from Stanford, showing how specific breathing patterns can improve your mood and reduce stress. Breath can do that and so much more. It is one of the greatest tools we have, and we take it for granted because it’s just so darned easy.
Breathing is the cornerstone of life. A person can live for a month without food, weeks without water, but only minutes without air. It’s such a basic thing that most of us miss its importance.
But here’s what’s interesting about what happens when you become present: You don’t need to learn any more techniques. You won’t have one more thing to learn. It’s about unlearning what you were taught so that your body can breathe as it was meant to.
We Were Taught to Breathe… by Our Family
If you were to have a photo taken of yourself when asked to take a deep breath when you were young, most probably you would suck in your belly, puff your chest out like a bodybuilder, and splay your arms wide. If your parents were to do the same thing, they would breathe in the exact same pattern.
It doesn’t matter if you are a generation apart. We adopt our parents’ attitudes. We also adopt their breathing patterns. That’s why we end up becoming like our parents. It’s because we have unconsciously adopted their patterns, their dynamics. We even breathe the same way.
And by Our Clothing
Until recently, women wore tight-fitting dresses and high heels. Men wore suits and ties. When you breathe normally, it is a full body experience. A full, unencumbered breath starts in the lower abdomen, fills the belly, and arrives at the upper chest. However, what do our clothes do?
When we cinch in our waists with tight belts, we block the body’s ability to take a full breath. When we as women wear bras, this tightens around the chest. When men wear ties, they are strangling the neck so it can’t move or expand freely. Fashion has taught us to wear clothing that inhibits the body from performing the only habit we do about thirty thousand times a day: breathe.
If you doubt what I am saying, do this exercise: Stand up and take a deep breath—the biggest one you can. Most probably, you are breathing with the same dynamic that your family and culture taught you.
A normal, full breath is like a bellows. In a healthy breath, when you inhale, the belly should expand like a balloon. The exhale is like a sigh which allows the lungs to deflate and shrink as the air is being expelled.
When the focus is on the inhale, the exhale becomes automatic. According to Dr. Judith Kratitz, the creator of Transformational Breathing, when you inhale, you are receiving all that life has to offer. When you exhale, it shows how you flow with things that are out of control.
But what do we do? We suck in our belly when we breathe, which forces the air up into the upper chest, keeping us up in our heads. It disconnects us from breathing into our lower abdomen, and when this happens, we lose touch with the earth and the natural rhythms of the body. In other words, we have been taught to live in our heads. And when this happens, we learn to breathe against our own nature.
So it’s not surprising that we don’t trust the world and live from a mindset of scarcity. We are at war with our own bodies, and that is reflected in our current mindset, which is one of a warrior culture.
Learning to breathe again—to find our own natural breath—takes time. However, if you try to do a full breath, you might find it’s not as easy as it sounds. It might feel like coordinating two separate motions that don’t mix. Becoming conscious of an unconscious habit is incredibly difficult.
It’s all about unlearning old dynamics and habits and allowing a new you—the you who is unique—to emerge.
So the trick is to learn what your natural breath is. When you reconnect with your natural breath, you don’t just feel calmer—you become more present. When you are more embodied, colors become richer, senses come alive, and you feel interconnected with yourself and the world.
Presence isn’t about forcing anything. Just as a dried leaf naturally finds its way to the ground through gravity, when you return to your natural breath, your awareness naturally settles into the body when you stop resisting it. The key isn’t learning new techniques—it’s removing what’s in the way.
In my decades of exploration and teaching, I’ve found that true presence doesn’t come from controlling your breath. It comes from trusting it. When you do that, everything else follows naturally.
Warmly,
Andrena
P.S. All the concepts that I share in my new book, “Embody: The Power of Presence in an Age of Distraction,” were developed in my previous novel, “The Magical Reality of Annabel Jones.” If you haven’t read it, you might want to pick it up, because it’s far more than just a novel. It explains a lot about why we were living the way we do, and what we can do to remedy it and live another way—the way we were supposed to live.
Source: “Can you breathe stress away?”, The Economist, Jan 17th 2025