The Borsalino Test #3: Breathe to heal
Friends,
I recently started this newsletter as an evolving collection of strings that could someday be spun into a larger story. For now, I will publish here my essays that cross between tech, personal growth, and decision making.
Through writing, I try to give back what I enjoy learning: how to think, wait, and fast. Arguably, that’s most of what you need: good decision-making rules, a long-term plan, and uncommon resilience to withstand difficulties.
Why ‘The Borsalino’s Hat Test’? Everyone who's read Shantaram, my favorite novel, would find this redundant. The Borsalino is this wide-brimmed hat made from very particular furs. This piece of art apparently digs quite the hole in your pocket, and there's bound to be fakes. In comes the Borsalino hat test. You roll the hat up into tube thingy and make it pass through a wedding ring. After emerging from the other side, if there are no creases, you've got yourself a deal. Most will argue Borsalino tests are part of life.
You can read all my essays here. Let’s go :)
Breathe to heal
Gluing it all together
A couple of weeks ago I ventured to Amsterdam-Noord on a rainy Friday night to participate in a three-day intensive retreat with author and speaker Max Strom. This one stretched my emotional musculature and illuminated a few novel neural pathways. In many ways I am still metabolizing my experience over that weekend, so I decided to crystallize my thoughts in written form to watch them take shape.
Max is this towering Oregonian best known for his books, courses and talks on personal transformation and wellbeing that ignited emotional change in many. Born with severe clubbed feet, Max spent much of the first years of his life with his lower limbs confined in plaster casts and braces. Today he embraces and preaches whole-body mobility as one of the world’s most revered yoga teachers. As you get closer to him in person, you can immediately detect a powerful, positive presence with a pinch of gravitas. He also exudes a sense of soothing serenity.
The workshop was definitely not a vacation, and the days extended from 9AM to 5PM. Throughout the weekend, I absorbed content, scribbled notes, and obviously practiced breathwork techniques on a yoga mat. I know what you’re thinking — who can afford a whole weekend to learn how to...breathe? I would agree that it’s very unusual, and to an extent even appreciate if the whole thing just sounds like mumbo jumbo to you. Hence my desire to write about it, and potentially spark curiosity if you, like me, never approached breathwork before.
Max’ mission is to empower people to live a more meaningful life. Sounds pretty generic, doesn’t it? So let me add more colour to it. His thesis in a nutshell revolves around interconnectedness of body, emotions and mind. It turns out that 100% of the things you do in life encompass at least one of those three elements. In most cases, all of them. Max is interested in popping the hood of this trifecta and claims that breath is the paste that glues the three components of the self together.
The workshop I attended was called ‘Breathe to heal’. Its purpose was to provide assistance in navigating what you’re currently battling in your life while learning how to release pent-up tension. If you are or have been traversing tough emotional states, I encourage you to set aside fifteen minutes to watch Max’ TED talk. It might help you calibrate your perspective on bodily reactions to emotional traumas.
Boiling frogs
So what’s all the fuss about breathing? First off, here in the West, we embrace a bizarre model of relationship between minds and bodies. We hold a subconscious belief that our heads are hosting a little dude who lounges in the control tower, receiving data from the outside and issuing commands to the body. Questions about dualism aside, what's riveting here is the implicit cultural construct that the mind is in control of the body. This way of looking at things is useful, but incomplete, because influence runs bidirectionally. What we do with our bodies can change how our minds think, feel, and perceive.
It may sound like I'm making some New Age-y claim, but I'm genuinely not. I'm just pointing out that specific physical actions, often even small and simple ones, can exercise agency over our thoughts, feelings, and perceptions of the world around us. Dancing lures us into joy. Bowing instills a sense of submission. Good posture strengthens perception of control. Breathing relaxes us. Viewed this way, the body can morph into an instrument, an input device, for manipulating the mind. Imagine your limbs as joysticks. Move them in a particular pattern and you can unlock entirely new states of consciousness. Wild, am I right?
Controlled breathing, like what I practiced in this workshop, has been shown to reduce stress, increase alertness and boost your immune system. For centuries yogis have used breath control, or pranayama, to promote concentration and improve vitality. Buddha advocated breath-meditation as a way to reach enlightenment. Conscious breathing activates the body’s relaxation response, which in turn reduces blood pressure, which in turn lowers the risk of stroke and improves cardiovascular health. It’s also good for digestion and general immunity, both of which are impaired by stress. Similar techniques are at the heart of hypnobirthing classes. As long as you don’t expect breathing alone to cure you, it probably won’t hurt you.
The relationship between our lungs and emotions was another mind-bender for me to learn. Breathwork extends a phone line between the body and our emotions. Controlled breathing may enable access to remote memories that plop to the surface like air-filled buoys unchained from the bottom of the ocean. We humans tend to sail unfazed through all kinds of micro-traumas and undetected emotional reactions, until we don’t - and crack open to slip into deliberate release. We behave like the proverbial frog immersed in gradually heating water that fails to notice the creeping progression in temperature, even as it's literally being boiled alive. On the surface, we seem to be getting used to changes, until it’s 100ºC and we have to hop out of the pot. Or exhale.
The cheapest health hack
If you think about it, it was not up until recently that people got familiar with the idea of regular physical exercise. More than two centuries ago Jane Austen characterized walking as a habitual part of her daily routine, and she was a pioneer in the field. In her letters, Austen says, "we do nothing but walk about" and "we walk a good deal". But up until the 1960s, jogging was something only athletes and boxers really did. The New York Times ran an amused trend piece in 1968 on the handful of unusual freaks who chose to run in their free time. ‘The Tribune’ of the era would ‘only see folly in the sight of a grown man running’.
A few years ago, Hillary Clinton claimed in her book ‘What Happened’ that yogic alternate-nostril breathing was what helped her get over losing the presidential election to Donald Trump: “Breathing deeply from your diaphragm, place your right thumb on your right nostril and your ring and little fingers on your left…” and so on. In some ways, rethinking the role of breathing in our lives it’s inevitable. A whole self-care industry has made us doubt everything we do naturally – eat, exercise, sleep – and breathing is at the heart of it all. Since you do it around 16 times a minute, 960 times an hour and 23,040 times a day, there’s an awful lot of room for improvement.
So here’s the thesis behind it. Humans used to breathe correctly. When a three-year-old breathes, their tummy goes in and out, right? Same with animals. But at a certain point we started breathing “vertically” - shoulders and torso stretch up when inhaling, and then drop back down. While it may feel like a full breath, you’re primarily using the tops of your lungs, which are the smallest parts of these organs. By using less of your lungs to inhale, you’re depriving your body of the oxygen it needs to function at its best.
That’s how we’re designed to breathe when facing genuinely stressful situations, like when we use to run from saber-toothed smilodons – but not, say, when our phone pings 150 times a day. Not only are we now much more sedentary, we’re also constantly reacting to digital nudges, which makes it for a respiratory disaster. When you’re looking at screens, your breathing patterns change. And, if you notice, you’re spending all day taking incredibly small breaths. The only time you’re really breathing is when you take a big, expansive sigh. Breathing properly is apparently the single most important intervention you can adopt for your own health. Cheap, too.
Breathing, in some ways, is closer to somatic functions (such as walking) than autonomic, involuntary functions (such as sweating). You don’t have to think about each step you take, you just head somewhere. Your brain automatically adjusts your steps, just in the same way it will occasionally insert a sigh when it needs more oxygen. You can also decide to hold your breath, hyperventilate and even thermoregulate. As modern humans, we live in a comfort zone that’s slowly killing us (remember the boiling frog?). Our ancestors used to be fine mooching around the tundra in loincloths. But as humans have learned to tame environments – with central heating, insulation, and coats – they lost the ability to self-regulate to nature, which was originally delegated to breathwork.
Meditation for those who can’t sit still
People that are hypervigilant are always prepared to feel unsafe. Soldiers always walk on eggshells after having been deployed to combat. Many have experienced violence, either physical or verbal. So we all default to a state in which we want to feel less exposed. Our brain defaults to negative, like when you hike in the woods and you mistake a stick for a viper. This is also why we become tribal and racist. Everyone who shattered our hearts also added extra decimal points to our emotional instrumentation.
Here’s proof. Write down the five worst experiences of your life. Done? Now write down the best five. Did it take the same time? And: do you spend the same amount and frequency of time mentally ruminating over the worst and best five? You probably don’t. We store and suppress because that’s what most of us have been taught to do. Sometimes emotional annihilation is a direct instruction - ‘Stiff upper lip’, ‘just get on with it’, or ‘big boys don’t cry’. Some other times, children emulate parents in the way they deal with anxiety, depression or multiple other forms of common mental health conditions.
Grief, anxiety and depression are all conditions generated by holding emotions close to the chest. For example, holding your breath is a gentle form of hyperventilation which, when practiced can cause some people to burst out crying. The goal of this practice is to untie knots of sedimented trauma and soft-land in a place of self-forgiveness. Breathing is massively practical. It’s meditation for people who can’t sit still and want to get down to brass tacks of emotional wellbeing.
How controlled breathing may promote healing remains a source of scientific study. One theory is that controlled breathing can alter the response of the body’s autonomic nervous system, which controls unconscious processes such as heart rate and digestion as well as the body’s stress response. Consciously changing the way you breathe appears to send a signal to the brain to adjust the parasympathetic branch of the nervous system, which can slow heart rate and digestion and promote feelings of calm as well as the sympathetic system, which regulates the release of stress hormones like cortisol.
Taking the body seriously
The lynchpin of the ‘enterprise of the self’ is the human body. Everything that happens to us, and every action we take, passes through the body. It’s the most immediate connection we have to external reality. And it’s through the body — that fragile nexus of metabolism and reproduction — that we confront the scarcity of the physical world. As such, the body is uniquely positioned to send honest signals. The physical body is not irrelevant to a human community. The emotional subtext of human communication is crucial to human thought. It isn’t a footnote.
Earlier I touched briefly on the idea of hosting a minion inside our crania that operates a panel with buttons, dials and switches. So the creature more or less controls the body… but they aren’t the same as the body. Alan Watts calls this the “myth of the skin-encapsulated ego”, also known as Cartesian dualism — a decidedly disembodied worldview. It privileges the mind (or soul) and downplays the importance of the body. To make a caricature of it, Descartes would happily sit in a vat, cogitating and perhaps exchanging thought-packets with other Cartesian beings. His body, merely a vessel.
In contrast, an embodied consciousness is concrete, empathic, enactive, and visceral — the awareness of being a creature with a body situated and enmeshed in the world. It’s the difference between the kind of awareness required for finance, and the kind required for police work. The difference between taking a math test and reading body language. Between linguistics and musicology. Offline and online processing. Self-consciousness and ‘presence.’ The difference between saying, “I have a body” and “I am a body.”
Of course, both embodied and disembodied consciousness exist simultaneously in any culture, and also (at various times) within any given person. But it’s a matter of degree. How frequently and how deeply do we experience disembodied consciousness, vs. how frequently and deeply do we experience embodied consciousness?
Embodied consciousness satisfies the criteria for honesty. Because it is not mediated through the verbal, egoic parts of the brain - there’s one fewer agent whose agenda you need to discount. And because it’s anchored to the body, it’s subject to the economic constraints of the physical world, making it easier to send and receive honest signals, and lead an authentic existence.
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