Homily: The Healing Power of Breath, By Erik Hooks

2016 August 31
by DoMC

The Healing Power of the Breath

First Unitarian Congregational Society

August 21, 2016

Human, all too human is a familiar lament.  Nietzsche’s full title was Human All Too Human, a Book for Free Spirits.  Let’s use a spirit of free inquiry to examine the biological roots of our condition. Our distant ancestors crawled out of the sea.  We are literally evolutionary fish out of water.  But this is also a metaphoric truth.  Our layered brains evolved over ages.  The neurological bits of sensation, perception, emotion, reaction, and action are old systems’ parts that we must use in new times.

But many adaptations are no longer optimal.  Our nervous systems overreact to minor threats and our innate aggression, rarely desirable, is often turned inward.  Neurological turmoil, particularly anxiety, is the norm. Our systems hardware is ancient, our software rudimentary.  We make due with our antiquated genetics.  Marketing our emotional apparatus as a product would be a hard sell.  The prospect would not warm the biotech industries financial cockles.

But hear the evangelical tidings this morning, good news indeed!  We have bio-hacks to upgrade the OS.  Breath control can address short term problems and perform long term maintenance of our neurological misfit with our current cultural ecology.  We can do adaptive evolution – behaviorally. Simple tools can help our psychology and our spirituality.

Good morning.  My name is Erik Hooks and my Unitarian-Universalist heritage traces to my mid-teens in Freeport, on Long Island.  Although hard to quantify I likely qualify as a lapsed UU, one now reentering the fold.

 My interest in today’s topic is an extension of classes taken when I returned to school at the millennium’s turn. Included were religion courses and a graduate neuroscience course on the brain.  Buddhism, the world’s first psychology, interests me.  [A little philosophy irony – Robert Thurman’s, yes Uma’s dad, offered a graduate course on Buddhist Emptiness. When I registered, I found that it was full]

I recently took the 16-hour course in compassion and meditation cobbled by the Dalai Lama and the Stanford University Medical school.  I liked it, a lot.  I took it three times, as well as a dozen other workshop-related events.  On my good days, I actively dialogue with the material.

My life experience also guides today’s choice of topic.  I have experience of war, wounds, and military hospitals.  Mel Gibson featured in a movie that memorialized my Army unit –mostly without glorifying war.  In my movie, I was a teenage NCO doing behind the lines reconnaissance with a small unit. Had I script control I would have deleted my gun shot wound scenes.  Six months in 5 hospitals did provide a lot of time for scripting.

There it is, the Buddha’s first noble truth.  We suffer because of the gap between our desire based scripts and reality.  Closing the gap is part of the Nobel prize winning Tagore’s achievement. Soaring language lifts us into the author’s “no gap” ecstasy.  Some of his words, which you just heard, now repeated: “the same stream of life that runs through my veins…breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers…rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and death, in ebb and flow…”

These are powerful images of the dynamic forces shaping a deeply felt life.

But most of our lives’ subjectivity is closer to the prosaic than the poetic.  Our reactions to experiences, and our gaps do matter, greatly, to both ourselves and to society.  Painful gaps are intimate.  They often shunt us to regular or picayune concerns about existence.

We dilute essence.

All too frequently we experience monkey brain – an incessant roof brain chatter. What choices have we when Tagorean torrents of feeling break upon us; the wrong way? And we literally mind the gap?  To avoid the gap’s unpleasant effects accept Jon Kabat-Zinn’s advice: “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.”

This is not an existential joke’s punchline.  Here, today, we have surfboards, ones floated by bio-hackery. Yes, I made that word up. Health practitioners across many cultures have known of the interplay between mood, and breath.  Psychologists now say that each emotion has a particular breathing pattern associated with it.  The good news is that we have some control of these feelings.  We can reverse engineer our emotions through our breathing.  This a major insight.  This is empowerment. Changing your breathing pattern can change your emotion.

One of the older methods to exercise breath control is a simple counting practice that times your inhalation, holding your breath and then exhalation.  This is the 4,7,8 yogic method popularized over decades by folks such as Dr. Andrew Weil.  His demo’s website is in the program.  It is one way to reset the autonomic nervous system.  See?  Surfboards!

In this practice we will inhale through the nose, hold our breath, then exhale through slightly pursed lips. We will make a small whooshing noise on the exhalation. [demo] .  I will count the numbers – 4 for inhale, 7, for holding, 8 for exhalation.  We will do this 4 times with one normal breath in between each counted one.  This can be done in any position but while seated it is recommended that legs are not crossed, both feet are planted, the back straight.

Several suggestions before we begin.  Place the tip of your tongue on the roof palate just behind your front teeth.  In Chinese medicine this connects the yin meridians in the front of your torso with the yang meridians of your back.  The tongue touch completes a healthful circuit. Allow the exhaled breath to move past the upraised tongue and through your lips.

 The second tip:  [please close your eyes if easier for you to relax and to visualize] Most of us carry tension somewhere in our body.  It is commonly found around the eyes and mouth.  Please picture Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.  Now let your mirror neurons mimic her face.  Relax the muscles around the eyes.  Relax the muscles around the mouth.  Smile slightly and if possible, enigmatically.

[Perform exercise]

Welcome to the relaxation response.  The effect will become more noticeable with more practice.  You are beginning to surf.  You just nudged your body’s fight or flight system toward its yin/yang partner – pause and plan. BP drops as we do this but it comes right back – longer effects are seen over months with a regular daily practice of 2X/day.  That is less than five minutes, total. There are measurable benefits after two months.  One immediate application: Dr. Weil knows of no better solution to waking up in the middle of the night and returning to sleep.

This bio-hack increases your available RAM.  In any given moment, you can retrieve those resources stolen by your fight or flight response, ones hijacked by evolution to deal with an anxious moment, and put them to better use, e.g. when you pause and plan.  A very fine thing indeed.  But what if those anxious moments arrive not as single spies but in battalions?  Time for a system upgrade.

Evolution has been good to us, i.e. we are a very successful species.  Top of the world Ma a la James Cagney in the movie White heat, just before he is blown sky high.  Thank you Evolution for getting us here but a quibble – you are doing us fewer favors now.  You sculpted us for an earlier, different, cultural environment.  Four once adaptive traits are now troublesome, perhaps even threatening.  Food and Salt are obvious ones.  When food was scarce, consuming what was at hand was a good idea. It is not as adaptive however with a full fridge at your elbow.  Salt was a significant way to insure proper fluid storage and an important part of sweating – the method by which we cooled down while running down prey.  With a lot less running and sweating, indulging our inherited taste preference for salt increases fluid retention and causes higher blood pressure. The third maladaptive trait is rapid blood coagulation.  While purposely flailing around in pursuit of prey or defending ourselves from becoming prey, it was good to not bleed out after injury.  [Personally, platelets kept me above ground, and I have no complaints, yet.]  With our current lifestyle, sitting desk-bound or lying sofa-prone, having a rapidly formed clot coursing through your body merely predisposes to stroke. But trait number four is at the door.  Its insistent banging is why we are assembled here.  We are emotional beings whose reactivity was once a very helpful asset. Hair trigger physiological reactions to personal threat are a good thing while in the presence of many real dangers.  Hence the phrase fight or flight.  But our bodies’ nervous systems have not been suitably scaled back to the diminished physical threat levels appropriate to random social gossip or tragedy TV.   Saber toothed tigers are gone.  Newspapers should not be as frightening as were large, carnivorous, fanged cats.  [a favorite NYer cartoon –The setting is a couple at a breakfast table.– A man holds a newspaper that is exploding away from his hands.  His coffee mug atilt, glasses awry, mouth in a grimace – his wife’s punchline – you know that the doctor told you no more op-ed.]

How many times does our heart sink when learning of our society’s daily inhumanities?  Few of these emotion arousing facts are a direct physical threat but our bodies dutifully muster resources, change our heart rate and breathing, shift blood from digestion and core organs to our limbs, etc. as if the threat was immediate. And forget about planning.  Received error message: Out of RAM.

Our hardwired reactions are blueprinted in DNA.  That same DNA programming includes aggression.  And with our complex societies’ discouragement of its expression, aggression may be internalized into crippling anxiety.  Further, “the instinct to hide or become submissive to a predator may transform into depression, even suicide.”

The Dean of Columbia University’s Medical Center writes, “our defenses against being murdered are now precipitating the anxiety and depression that are disabling and killing more of us than the violence they were designed to avoid.”  This is a price we pay for our inherited nonspecific eternal vigilance. How IS your breathing?  Take a moment to check.  Awareness is our foundation principle.

 I state the consequences of our emotional wiring not to alarm but to remind us that we all deal with the same kludgy system.  As we present healing choices and become more hopeful, we should be better inclined to compassion.  BTW, a universal solvent for dealing with difficult people, which I learned in the compassion course, is to humanize them.  Wonder to yourself what is their favorite vegetable.

Pulling the plug on the outside world is no guarantor of stress reduction.  And we can’t disengage our DNA from our inner life.  We swim our life’s tide, struggling literally at times to keep our head above our emotional waters.  So how else can we catch our breath and a wave?  How do we stay up on Kabat-Zinn’s surfboard?

 The 4,7,8 breathing is a good in-the-moment practice, but can we stabilize the board?  Can we increase our general resilience?  Recent reports state that emotional resilience is deeply connected to body awareness.  Even self-help guru Tony Robbins says “get out of the trouble in your head and get into your body.” Different cultures favor different methods for grounding awareness in the body.  One system that combines three methods is synthesized by a Columbia Medical School Psychiatry professor.  Dr. Richard Brown wrote the book whose title I have borrowed for this homily. His bio-hack IS our nervous system upgrade.

Our breathing technique works because the body knows breathing is key.  Breath’s significance, the very stuff of life, means that respiratory messages have top priority when it comes to getting the brain’s attention. What we think typical of the brains body mobilization system, top down, is also reversible.  Our body can demobilize the brain.  That is the how of this practice’s usefulness.

Dr. Brown’s three mutually reinforcing bio-hacks are counting the breath, resistance breathing, and guided breath placement.

 #1 – very western, very clinical – counting the number of breaths per minute [5 is frequently optimal].  #2 The yogic resistance breathing, aka Ocean breath, the Sanskrit ujjiya, with its poetic translation – victory over the mind through breath.  It is roughly akin to a cat’s purring.  Ujjiya essentially decreases the size of the airway to create the resonance. In human practice it is barely audible.  Think of the sound inside of a sea shell.  #3 is an old Daoist practice, which I learned in taiji, is placing the of breath in different areas of the body via intention.  It is a way to explore body sensations and awareness.  The book comes with a very helpful demonstration CD. It is an inexpensive paperback.

These techniques are easy to learn.  They can be used singly to good effect but the goal is to use all three together.  Simultaneous use is achieved by some beginners in one or two 20 minute sessions. Recommended daily practice is one 20 minute session.  Emotional resilience will increase.

One of the well-established markers for emotional resilience is something called heart rate variability.  The heart rate increases slightly on the inhalation and decreases slightly on exhalation.  Some meditation technologies have hardware to measure this.

Now a word about Meditation.  Its foundation is awareness.  Let’s jump to a major goal. One may be to validly question the nature of our own ego.  Is it ours in the sense that we crafted it?  Is it simply the result of anonymous forces acting on us.?  The codependent origination of all phenomena, a central Buddhist tenet, doesn’t leave a lot of room to believe that my ego has supreme agency.  I am not Donald Trump.  In short, the world’s events are not personally directed.  All the more reason to have compassion for everyone’s suffering.

That particular ego discovery is a fine premise for engaging in meditation. But the process can be daunting and even interim outcomes very practitioner dependent.  Your mileage may vary.  Pursuing our bio-hacking analogy, meditation is not the most efficient software at hand, especially for those of us pursuing a middle path, that of householders.  Why not something immediately accessible with demonstrable results? Something with a proven multicultural track record?  We can substitute teachers, mentors, and gurus for a few demonstrators.  We have quick albeit temporary results, e.g. the situation specific 4,7,8 breath and some longer term effects.  But we also get long term benefits via the short daily practice created by Dr. Brown. The brain will literally begin to rewire itself. E.g. the amygdala will decrease its size over months. Not necessarily George Costanza’s dramatic shrinkage but a measurable reduction.  Brain wave measurements show my post traumatic stress to be improving.  One prominent researcher, Richard Davidson, says the physical changes in the brain are so evident, so astounding, as to ask why isn’t everyone doing a self-awareness practice?

Why not indeed?  You can start with the off the shelf bio-hacks that we outlined today.

When you do, you will increase your emotional resilience.  This is not a theoretical quality.  Its presence is detected in HRV. A quick point of information about HRV.  the greater the difference, the greater the resilience – and, per that factor, the greater one’s physical longevity and the more stable one’s emotional life.  I repeat the operative word, resilience. Resilience increases the capacity for choice. As Hamlet famously noted, the readiness is all.

One last citation: [Laura Graham]

Catch the moment and make a choice.  Every moment has a choice, every choice has an impact.  How you respond to the issue…is the issue.

Dr. Brown’s simple tools are great choices in how to respond to issues of our self-hood.

Recall that each emotion has a specific breathing associated pattern.  Our emotional state is evident in our physiological state. But we can change that emotion with our breath. The breath is both yardstick and self-empowering tool for healing.  Use it and it will become more user-friendly.

Choose the healing power of the breath. And, when appropriate, think of another’s favorite vegetable.

Dr Andrew Weil explains and demonstrates the 4-7-8 breath:

http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/VDR00112/The-4-7-8-Breath-Benefits-and-Demonstration.html

The Healing Power of the Breath: Simple Techniques to Reduce Stress and Anxiety, Enhance Concentration, and Balance Your Emotions by Richard P Brown [2012]

 

 

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