breathing

Breathing is important for our health, but many people have shallow breaths due to fear or anxiety. It's important to check our breathing and improve it. Exercise can help regulate our breathing rhythm. Learning to breathe out is relaxing, while the in-breath can be sharper or more gradual. Abdominal breathing, where the belly expands, is beneficial. Chanting or singing can also improve breathing. It doesn't matter what you sing, as long as you focus on the breathing aspect. Singing has healing properties and can be done in various forms. So, don't assume that only practices like pranayama or tai chi focus on breathing. Western movements also emphasize the importance of breathing and singing for health. Hi everyone, I thought I'd talk today about breathing. Now, we all do it, and some of us do it better than others, but it's actually very important. I've spent a lot of my life on a very high, shallow breath, hardly breathing at all, and this is a fear response, or an apprehension of some terrible calamity about to happen, so you just sort of go, like that. That's how shallow the breathing was, and of course, this can lead to ill health, and so the breathing is very important. Now, there's different ways of, you will find things like pranayama in yoga, which is the breathing science, but if you're just interested in improving your health, it's worth checking your breathing. If you're doing things like running, or very fast walking, or cycling, you're going to breathe. You're going to breathe, you're going to have to. So, any form of exercise will force you into a breathing rhythm that is more akin to where, it shouldn't be that fast, you shouldn't be out of breath, but it should be like that. If you want to do, if you just want to learn to breathe, the important thing is the out-breath. If you can learn to breathe out, that's relaxing, that's like a sigh, like a sigh, you know, and the in-breath, that can be a bit sharper, like so, right, just like an in-breath through the nose, or it can be more gradual, and slow, and the same with the out-breath, so you're doing an equal in-breath and out-breath. And the other thing that people don't do, very much in the West, they don't know this abdominal, I can't even say it, abdominal breathing, the breathing from the danten, the lower part of the belly, it's like letting you sort of, when you breathe in, you let the belly expand to make room for the lungs to go down. So, this is worth learning, how to do this form of breathing. And the other thing that you, it's very easy to do, and that you can do secular chants, is chanting. Chanting is a form of breathing, where you breathe in, and you're not chanting when you breathe in, and therefore, in some ways, you have to focus more on that, making that gentle. You'll find that, for instance, in Tai Chi, the breathing is perfectly natural, there's no constriction, it just comes naturally through the relaxation, you just breathe in a way that is natural to you. Some schools of Tai Chi, they do concentrate very much on very physical movements that force you into a more strenuous form of physical movement, which increases your breathing capacity, and your need to breathe, to feed the low stances that they may use, and so on, much more. Alright, but the, okay, let's talk about the chanting aspect. If you're a secular person, you may decide that you want to do singing, you may decide, for example, you may decide you want to sing, well, whatever you're comfortable with, you can sing God Save the Queen, what does it matter? You can, if you're a socialist, you, what do they call their song, the, oh, I don't even know the tune, so, but you can use these different forms of singing, even hymn singing, that you learn from a child, or, you know, I remember songs that we used to sing in the playground, or we were taught at school, you can sing those, it doesn't matter, the singing, the singing in the shower, sing in the shower, if you've got nowhere else to sing, or sing silently to yourself, but the singing has an aspect of healing, and it also has an aspect of breathing in and breathing out, which is what you want to do, so don't assume that it's only the, you know, there's only chanting, there's only pranayama, and there's only tai chi, and these other things that focus very much on the importance of healing and health, there's all kinds of western movements that focus very much on the importance of breathing and singing, singing, chanting, singing, plain song, I don't know, whatever, you can sing opera, sing opera if you want, if you can, even if you do it badly, who's listening in the shower? Who's listening in the shower? So, anyway, that's a few thoughts about improving your breathing for your health. Okay, bye now.