Breathing Success In Life, Love, Business, And Beyond

If you can do something with the breath, you will attain the source of life. If you can do something with the breath, you can transcend time and space. If you can do something with your breath, you will be in the world and also beyond it.

THE BOOK OF SECRETS

In the fall of 1969 when I was training as an X-ray technician I saw an invitation on the bulletin board to learn cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). I signed up, without the slightest thought. The desire to learn to breathe life into another human being was instant, automatic, and irresistible. I couldn’t believe it when showed up for the course and discovered that I was the only one from my department attending. A few weeks later, I was sent to the intensive care unit to take a routine portable chest X-ray. John, I learned later, was a baseball talent scout. As soon as I walked into the room I felt something was not right. I leaned in as close as I could to him, carefully looking, listening, and feeling. He was not breathing! Just then, the beep, beep, beep coming from his cardiac monitor turned into a long, steady beeeeeeeeep. His heart stopped cold, and at that moment, mine began to race. I checked his pulse. Sure enough: nothing! I peeled open his eyelids: his pupils were fixed and dilated. He was clinically dead. I jumped into action and did everything by the book, exactly as I was instructed and had practiced in class. I threw his pillow onto the floor behind me. I tilted his head back, pinched his nose, covered his mouth with mine, and blew a big breath into him. I watched his chest fill, and then watched and listened as his chest collapsed and the air escaped. I blew another big breath into him then yelled for help. I positioned my hands over his sternum just as I had been taught and did five quick heart compressions. Nurses and doctors began arriving but had trouble getting themselves and the crash cart into the room because my X-ray machine was blocking the door. The bed was too soft, his whole body was giving in under the pressure of my hands, and I was worried that the heart compressions were not being effective. I heard myself shout: “We need a backboard! Someone get a backboard!” Was that my voice? It was two octaves higher than normal. I realized that to help him, the first thing I needed to do was to relax and take a breath for myself. A couple of people on the team quickly slid the backboard under him, and I blew two more big breaths into him. As I started another series of compressions, I felt more confident. A nurse leaned in with an Ambu bag (a manual resuscitator) to take over the ventilation. One of the doctors was getting in position beside me, preparing to take over the manual compressions, when suddenly John came alive with a jolt. His eyes shot open. He looked startled, afraid for a moment, but then extremely peaceful. Just like that, he began to breathe on his own. Someone checked and said: “Good strong pulse.” It was over almost as soon as it had begun. Most of the ICU team went back to what they were doing, with no fanfare whatsoever. To them, I suppose it was business as usual, just another day at the office. But I wanted to jump up and down and shout. This was a freaking miracle! A few minutes ago the man had been clinically dead, and now he was alive and breathing again. I wanted to celebrate. I wanted to cry. I needed to hug somebody. Two of the nurses had stayed in the room. With calm and meticulous care, they got all of his tubes and wires back in order. One of them asked him: “How are you feeling?” He didn’t answer. Energy from the adrenaline as well as from the joy was vibrating in me and streaming through me. I was high as a kite and shaking like a leaf. I stood in the doorway leaning on my X-ray machine, feeling elated, watching and listening to John’s breathing. When the nurses were done, I did what I was sent there to do: I took his X-ray and pretended that it was just another day at the office for me too. But truly it was the most amazing day of my life. I was hooked on the miracle of breath! After that first experience, I had the opportunity to resuscitate more than a dozen people over the next ten years. When you love what you do, life gives you lots of opportunities to do it! And I also trained several thousand other people to perform CPR, a skill worth having and sharing! The breath is in many ways our closest friend and helper in life; it is our constant companion from birth to rebirth. It faithfully supports us in everything we do whether or not we are aware of it, and whether or not we appreciate it. Our breath in many ways is like the canary in the coal mine. Do you know this story? In the old days, coal miners often died when pockets of poisonous gases were uncovered in the mining process. These gases were often odorless and tasteless, so they learned to bring a canary down into the mines with them. Because the bird was more sensitive than the men, it would succumb to the deadly gases before the miners were even aware of it. Those birds saved countless lives. And our breath is like this canary: it responds to things that we are not conscious or aware of. I’ve always been fascinated by a particular biorhythm, a natural phenomenon that the ancients believed was so important that an entire branch of yoga, called Swara yoga, evolved around it. Did you know your breath swings back and forth like a pendulum between your left and right nostrils about every hour or so, and it has been doing this since the day you were born? Check it out now. Close one nostril and breathe in and out through the opposite one; then switch and breathe in and out through the other. Which nostril feels more open? Which feels more constricted? Check it again after a while, and you will probably find that it has changed. There are also times when the nostrils are equally open and balanced. This right and left nostril dominance is no doubt connected to left-and right-brain activity, and you can set your watch by it. This rhythm also happens to be one of the first rhythms to be disturbed when something in us goes out of balance, and when illness creeps in. The Swara yogis developed various exercises and techniques to influence this rhythm, to adjust and rebalance it when necessary. What’s more, the yogis discovered that this rhythm is related to aspects of life far beyond the body—things like sun and moon and planetary cycles and astrology. They scheduled mental and physical activities such as waking and sleeping, bathing and eating, working and meditating according to this rhythm. They considered it when deciding to focus on a math problem and when to write poetry. They turned to it to know when to ask a favor of the king when to go into battle when to pray when to work in the garden, and when to make love. For more than a year, I was obsessed with this yogic practice. I kept a small crescent-shaped mirror in my pocket, and dozens of times each day, I would take it out, put it under my nose, and breathe onto it. I would study the size and shape of the two moist clouds that appeared, noting the time of day, my general mood, where I was, what I was doing, who was with me, and what was happening. I learned a lot about myself and others, about life and the world, and the breath and breathing. I am not suggesting that you need to be quite that fanatical—okay, wait, maybe I am! No, what I am saying is that there are lots of things related to the breath that we have not discovered or explored, and that breathing is related to every level of our being, that it holds many mysteries, and that breathwork can be used to improve every area of our lives.