Breathing Beyond Mindfulness
/Hello Yogis! Hello Autumn!
I've been listening to YouTubes by Patrick McKeown, writer of The Oxygen Advantage. Wow! There’s so much information that this Friday Email is becoming part one of two posts! He’s really worth a listen! I've been listening to his Atomic Focus Breathing workshops part 1. He starts by saying: 'This is not about mindfulness. This is about going beyond it'.
He says that mindfulness was developed 2,500 years ago when they didn't have so many chronic stresses influencing the breath. Today, we don't have deep sleep and we don't have optimal breathing patterns. But if we can get our breathing tools in order, we have so much more potential to reach. Without these tool and with a messy mind, we miss out on what life has to offer.
A lot of mistruths have crept into the breathing world! The biggest mistruth is about taking a big breath. The reality is that "the harder and faster we breathe, the more we blow off carbon dioxide from the blood through the lungs. This causes our blood vessels to constrict and reduces oxygen to the brain. Additionally, when you increase blood pH, you arouse the central nervous system – in other words, the brain gets agitated when breathing hard and fast”.
Right at the end someone asks the question: 'What do you say to yoga teachers who are all about taking a deep breath?' Patrick McKeown says: "I think yoga teachers will get so much by having a look at the three dimensions of breathing from a biochemical point of view, and a biomechanical point of view, and a resonance frequency point of view."
This is a really exciting workshop because there is just so much to understand about breathing. Oxygen Advantage Atomic Focus Breathing Workshop - Part 1
Classes
Classes are online for the next two weeks. I’ll be in Kythera, Greece. I’ll take my camera with me and do classes from there. You can book all classes here. I’ll prompt you via the Friday Email about returning and being back to teach classes in my lucky home studio again.
Yoga In The News
The Times has: British diet barely improves in 30 years. I include this because yogis become interested in diet,clean eating and various types of fasting. The article says: ‘The study used the Alternative Healthy Eating Index, which ranks different diets from a range of cultures on a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 would represent very heavy consumption of sugar and processed meats while 100 would be an ideal balance of fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts and whole grains’.
Discover Magazine has: Does Yoga Really Detoxify the Body? ‘Research suggests that this particular myth was born out of what's been dubbed the "squeeze and soak" theory, coined by internationally-known yogi B.K.S. Iyengar, who founded his eponymous yoga style in the 1960s. He also popularized the notion that twists can cleanse and that certain moves that squeeze the internal organs can help with detoxification. Essentially, Iyengar compared what happens inside your body during a twist to dirty water being squeezed out of sponge to make room for clean water. But our bodies don’t need extra squeezing to do what they already do. To better understand why, we need a better understanding of the clinical definition of detox — and a short physiology lesson.’
