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BREATH This book will change your life (100%, "overnight")
Thanks so much for that summary of the different methods Dino. I have really poor breathing and am approaching it v gently. Just nose breathing, focusing on breathing from my diaphram and slowing my breathing down have already given me noticable improvements. (I have a ticking clock playing on you tube that helps me keep my focus on my pace of breathing.) My morning oxygenation has doubled and I feel less breathless. My energy seems to be improving.
It was really helpful to read the basics of what the different methods do.
Wishing you all the best.
I think that VA toxicity often creates issues with breathing. These problems may predate VA detox or suddenly arise during detox. Tar, Ourania, myself and others have seen problems.
In my opinion, this is probably due to inflammation of the passageways (which could be intermittent due to exposures), and actual shrinkage and damage to tissues. An example of this is the bent fingers that Grant and I have. You can do lots of stretching, but stretching isn't going to be an overnight fix. The body will need to work on that over time, and Grant's straightened fingers are testament to the fact that this can happen.
Still I'm sure that breathing properly helps a lot, and that over a long time the tissues will un-swell and, like Grant's fingers, even unshrink and heal.
At the start of the year I posted about having shortness of breath for many weeks. It was constant throughout the day, was a bit scary. Then one day it just stopped as uneventfully as it started.
I think breathing issues are highly complex but it's probable often vA, vD and K2 levels are highly involved.
I see hypoventilation practises to improve breathing a bit like I see yoga to improve flexibility. Yoga is marketed well but when you dig a bit deeper you find big problems like yoga teachers having high rates of back problems. Flexibility is a marker of health so people associate yoga with health but yoga doesn't address causal issues for lack of flexibility and thus comes with a range of downsides and shortcomings.
This isn't to say that some gentle stretching or being mindful about not hyperventilating isn't helpful but lack of flexibility and tendency to hyperventilate are not so much causes as they are effects and so causes must be identified as a priority.
To illustrate this: If someone has acne and takes Accutane they choose to apply a non causal "solution" to a problem. From a daoist or wisdom based perspective (or common sense but it's easy to have common sense in hindsight) the correct solution is to research until one has identified the cause of the problem or to simply live with and accept the problem, non action. By choosing a non causal solution we usually add to the disharmony in our life, it's a dishonest approach to our life. Accutane can mess with one's biological clock and let's say that this person who takes Accutane needs to sleep into the late morning. One's circadian rhythm can be off for all sorts of biochemical reasons but in this person the cause is retinoic acid. The yoga/buteyko/mechanistic approach to this problem would be to just force oneself to get up early with a loud alarm clock. Some people will loudly exclaim how wonderfully effective a solution that was, some of them genuine, others lying to themselves. But for many this won't solve the problem at all, they will just end up getting less sleep and feeling worse.
Because physiological problems can be so complex and hard to understand we often address physiological problems with mechanistic solutions (with flawed theoretical foundations) or physiological solutions that don't address the cause.
@tim-2 you put it very well, what I was trying to express.
And the loud alarm clock might help you keep your job! 🙂 In other words, the mechanical fix might keep damages a small as possible.
A person whose head is tilted to the right might become moreso over time if he doesn't realize he is going through life crooked and make an effort to be straight.
Posture is obviously a very mechanistic type issue. If a person has a tilted cranium his mandible and his hips will be tilted the other way, consciously trying to change the posture out of its established pattern isn't likely to help. Bit of a long shot but ultimately that person might find the most relief, not from chiropractors etc but from K2 supplementation and lowering vA.
"Alexandra David-Néel used Tummo and other ancient breathing and meditation practices until she died in 1969, at the age of 100. One of her acolytes, a man named Maurice Daubard, is still alive. Daubard had spent his teenage years bedridden in a village hospital with tuberculosis, chronic lung inflammation, and other illnesses. By his 20s, the doctors had given up. Daubard decided to heal himself. He read books, trained in yoga, and taught himself Tummo. He not only completely cured his body of any sickness but gained a superhuman strength. On his off hours of working as a hairdresser he's strip to his underwear and run barefoot through snowy forests. Decades before Wim Hof, he immersed himself in ice from the neck down and sat there motionless for 55 minutes. Later, he ran 150 miles beneath the searing sun of the Sahara desert. At 71, he toured the Himalayas on his bike at an elevation of 16,500 feet. But his greatest feat, Daubard said, was helping thousands of others with illnesses learn the power of Tummo to heal themselves, just as he'd done". ===> page 157, "Breath, by James Nestor"
"Over the span of a decade, Hof broke 26 world records, each more baffling than the last. These stunts earned him international fame, and his smiling, frost-covered face soon appeared on dozens of magazine covers, in flashy documentary specials, and in a handful of books. Wim violated the rules laid out in medical textbooks so drastically scientists had to pay attention, saif Andrew Huberman, a professor of neurobiology at Standord University. Scientists paid attention." p 152, Breath, by James Nestor
It is true that most modern yoga teachers have no clue about true, ancient yoga, and do it completely wrong. However, when things are done properly as laid out by ancient masters, miracles become real. It may be all "mechanistic" for people who have been taught to see the whole world as mechanistic, but everyone I know who practices correctly the methods is a "super" human, physically and mentally, compared to the rest. In any case, whether it is pure mechanics or not, "causal" or not, if people can heal with these methods, it is worth a try and basically it costs nothing. And if they heal with that when everything else has failed, and break record after record, who cares whether it is mechanistic or not and whether science has proved it or not?
Hof & co and many people I know who practice these methods dont supplement with K2 or whatever else; one day they just have enough. They tried everything with no avail, they just continue to suffer too much; and then on day they decide to change their breathing, apply a few ancient techniques, and completely change their lives for the better. You can, too. However I won't argue anymore because at this point everything has already been written.
I don't disagree that "A" and other poisons are problematic nor that some supplements can help nor that for some people it can be necessary to change diet or whatever else could be required. But in my experience (and from what I have seen and read from many, many, many people) breath is almost always the most essential component in one way or the other.
Best wishes to you all.
Maurice Daubard is still alive. I think he was 77 years old in 2007. Maybe I am mistaken.
His institute is organizing teaching seminars, at very low cost. This is happening in Europe, France and Italy.
His website (in French) is here:
Thanks so much for creating this post ! I read the book ( amazing information in it ) and my husband and I started mouth taping two weeks ago . It has really helped us in our sleep , it is very deep now and our energy levels have improved . We are also 26 months in on the low A diet ( which has helped a lot too )
please let me know if it is accurate that 70% of detoxification happens through breath in relation to retinol .
Again I would like to thank you for posting this !!
If anyone would like to talk about experiences or knowledge about mouth taping -- I'm ultra curious!
I've been pondering the little debate here regarding the chicken-and-egg of breathing, yoga, posture, habits and how they intersect with VA toxicity.
I've got a few interesting tidbits to share that keep me right down the middle of the road. In other words, I think that breathing, posture etc are very important, and so is lowering your toxic input.
tidbit 1: I've seen an occasional chicken (voluntarily) decide to sleep in cramped quarters. (under porches, say, or under eaves) over time, perching in cramped quarters takes it's toll on their posture and that does seem to affect their over-all health. (compared to other chickens with the same VA level of toxicity). They have lowered energy, they look under the weather, and sometimes they stop perching at all and sleep in a corner (a sign of a weak chicken)
tidbit 2: I have decided that some of my breathing issues are actually about posture and not 100% about the airway! As I've said, I think that VA toxicity leads to becoming crooked. Crooked fingers, shoulders bent forward, hands and feet curled inward crooked teeth etc. I think it is interesting that Price believed that VK was super important to the arches of the body, and perhaps having high VA is the opposite of that.
Anyhoo, I've realized that if I arch my back (backs are meant to have an arch, not be completely flat), pinch my wings in back,, level my chin, and imagine the back of my head is pulled up by a string... suddenly I breathe very well. Not a very big mystery, this allows the lungs to expand. Sometimes, nose and ears will even respond to this posture change! As the old song "Dem Bones" says, I guess "the nose bone's connected to the... back bone" lol. (don't forget to soften the gut, allow it to expand and contract)
tidbit 3. I think that even though I have known for many years that mouth breathing is bad, I think I still do it sometimes, and when I do it I lick my lips... and THAT is probably why, at this late a date, I'm still having issues with chapped lips. I probably need to try mouth taping in the DAYTIME.