Breath summary

Our troubled relationship with breathing goes back long before Homo sapiens evolved – it goes all the way back to 1.7 million years ago, when our distant ancestors Homo habilis, and later Homo erectus, started processing food before eating it.

Even before Homo erectus started to cook food – around 800,000 years ago – Homo habilis had been tenderizing it. Both tenderizing and cooking meant more calories could be digested, drawing more energy from food. With that extra energy, those species’ brains grew ever larger. Later still, about 300,000 years ago, their progeny, Homo sapiens, developed speech, when the larynx descended into the throat.

In 1958, the East Orange Veterans Affairs Hospital in New Jersey made a curious appointment. They hired a choir director by the name of Carl Stough to take a look at a group of patients with emphysema – a debilitating, chronic lung disease.

Though he lacked training in medicine, Stough quickly diagnosed the problem. Noting that the patients were taking short, rapid breaths, Stough reasoned that the problem wasn’t inhaling – they were taking in plenty of air. The problem was, in fact, that they weren’t breathing out sufficiently.

Before we look at the chemical process that drives breathing, consider this.

Think about the “Om” chant of Jainism, the rosary of Catholicism, the sa ta na ma chant used in Kundalini yoga, and prayers coming from anywhere from Japan to Hawaii to China. How long do you think it takes someone in each of these traditions to breathe while they’re praying or meditating?

As we noted earlier, our modern lifestyle isn’t good for the way we breathe. For the last 300 years, processed food has meant we’ve had to chew much less – which has in turn reduced the size of our mouths, made our teeth crooked, and obstructed our airways. It is a key reason why breathing conditions are so common these days, from snoring to asthma.

But here’s the good news: Because these problems are brought on by our habits, it’s surprisingly easy to reverse the trend. It’s even possible to change the shape of our mouths, as some fascinating advances in orthodontics have shown.

There are many easy fixes you can make, both to open up your airways and to reap the benefits of good breathing habits. But pushing things even farther can lead to results that seem truly superhuman.

Take Swami Rama, a man from northern India who visited a psychiatric clinic in Topeka, Kansas, one day back in 1970. Hooked up to various measuring devices, he stunned doctors by demonstrating his control over his body. Within a minute, he reduced his heart rate from 74 beats per minute to 52; later, he increased it from 60 to 82 within eight seconds. He also made his heart beat at 300 beats per minute, for a full 30 seconds – a rate that would usually be fatal. Rama also controlled his body temperature – he created an 11° temperature gap between his thumb and little finger.

Push the heavy breathing methods even farther, and they can affect the mind as well as the body – with effects similar to those of psychedelic drugs.

In 1956, a psychology student, Stanislav Grof, volunteered for a drug trial. A hundred micrograms of a strange new substance caused him to have vibrant, transcendent visions. He was one of the very first to try LSD.

Despite the ongoing work of scientists like Justin Feinstein, investigation into the power of breathing and carbon dioxide levels is still in its infancy. Most of the pioneers in this area – people like Carl Stough or John Mew – have been operating well outside Western medical orthodoxy.

Elsewhere in the world, however – as Swami Rama and the practitioners of Tummo show – this wisdom about breathing is mainstream. And these ancient traditions provide a more integrated way of thinking about it.