Expand Your Ability: Embodiment, Somatics, and Feldenkrais

00:02
We breathe every day. And how you breathe, whether through your nose or through your mouth, the volume of air that you take in, the shape of your breath in your body, where you breathe in your body, reflects you. How you think, how you feel, what's going on beneath the hood. And how you deliberately breathe can feed back into your system, changing your system.

00:32
So your breath is you, an intrinsic part of you. We'll explore some of Feldenkrais' thoughts on breathing today. Welcome to the Expand Your Ability podcast. I'm your host, Jeffrey Schwinghammer. This show explores how we can connect to who we truly are by stepping out of our thinky, thinky minds and entering into our senses through movement. On today's episode, we're exploring breath and to do so, we're going back to the book.

01:02
Moshe Fowling-Kreis' 1972 book, Awareness Through Movement. In this book, he gives some arguments for why movement as a way to understand yourself, to learn about yourself, to improve your abilities. He gives nine reasons why for movement. Why movement? This episode is a part of a series. This is number eight out of nine. You can check out the previous episodes.

01:31
I'll put the episode numbers in the show notes if you want to check out the other ones. Don't worry, if you start here, you can start anywhere in these episodes. I'm going to read two paragraphs and then go through them line by line, and we'll explore it together. I'll relate the paragraphs to my experience with the Feldenkrais method as a practitioner, and some of the other somatic work that I've done. For example, in the Kinesa approach...

02:00
to movement, there are seven principles. And these principles are kind of the aspects of your experience that develop that evolve through exploration through practice. And one of them is the breath, how the breath changes, become something we can track and learn through. So breathing is essential.

02:29
Alright, let's get to the book. Okay, got the book open. So, number eight. Breathing is movement. So he's talking here about why movement? Well, breathing is movement. He says, Our breathing reflects every emotional or physical effort and every disturbance. It is also sensitive to the vegetative processes.

02:57
Disturbances of the thyroid gland, for instance, causes a special kind of breathing that serves to diagnose this disease. Any strong sudden stimulus causes a halt in breathing. Everybody knows from his own experience how closely linked breathing is with every change of feeling or anticipation of a strong emotion. Alright, that's the first paragraph. Let's get into this.

03:28
So he says, our breathing reflects every emotional or physical effort and every disturbance. Yeah, a hundred percent. If you're in awareness through movement or functional integration, or just paying attention to yourself throughout the day, you will, you will notice that your breath changes. Every emotional or physical effort or every disturbance, that's like all of your life.

03:57
That is being alive in an environment. That's everything. So if you're in an argument or this conflict in the room, or you're pleasantly enjoying the outdoors, right? All these different environments, these different experiences will have an effect on your breath.

04:23
If you were to push something really, really heavy, right? That's a big effort, right? It's gonna, you're gonna have to, mm, right, like, you know, the sound that comes with that, oh, right, that's a type of breath that helps in that process. So, yeah, no question, no question that effort affects your breath.

04:48
He goes on to say, the breath is also sensitive to the vegetative processes. Disturbances of the thyroid gland, for instance, causes a special kind of breathing that serves to diagnose this disease. All right. That's cool. I'm not familiar with this disturbance of the thyroid gland. So I'll take his word for it. But yeah, so it's also sensitive to the vegetative processes. So.

05:15
vegetative processes, I think he's using kind of this old term that we now refer to as the autonomic nervous system. So the autonomic nervous system controls, like your unconscious elements, right, like your heart rate, your digestion, like your, your eyes and how they respond to the environment, urination, and also your breath.

05:43
Right. So what's going on inside your whole system affects your breath too.

05:51
Okay, next. Any strong sudden stimulus can cause a halt in breathing. I think you know this one for sure, right? Like the door slam shut, or there's a lion that roars, right? Or there's a gunshot. Definitely like you just go. What was that? Right? You pause you stop it stops in that moment.

06:19
I know this is used in martial arts, I think, in at least Aikido, the use of a ki-ai, which is kind of like this kind of vocal utterance with a lot of breath power to it that stops a person in their tracks. It's to kind of trigger a person to, you know, and then you can use that moment to take the advantage.

06:47
Definitely, right? Being caught by surprise. Right? The breath stops in that moment.

06:56
The next line is, everybody knows from his own experience how closely linked breathing is with every change of feeling or anticipation of a strong emotion. Yeah, I feel like this is true for my experience. Is it true for your experience? Is there a closely linked connection between your breath and what you feel and what you anticipate with strong emotions?

07:25
Strong emotions, sadness, right? Oh, you know, or anger, hmm. Or laughter, right? The way the sound comes out. Or maybe something more sensitive, more gentle. Hmm.

07:51
There's these different ways of breathing and it comes out a little bit different in the voice too.

07:59
Is that true for you? I invite you to take a look and find out if that's true for you today. If you have any strong emotions or anticipation towards anything, does your breath change?

08:13
Speaking of the emotions, I'm studying the emotional body right now. And you'll hear more about that in a few episodes when I talk with Laura Bond, the sort of founder of the emotional body method. She taught me about three types of breathing, abdominal, clavicular, and thoracic.

08:37
So abdominal is breath that goes down into your belly. You can think of it filling like a balloon down there, all directions, or like a tube around your low belly.

08:53
And clavicular is breath that comes up into your chest, comes up towards your sternum. And then there's also thoracic breath that goes kind of into your ribs, out to the side. You can actually breathe there too. And so you can practice these different breathing patterns. In the emotional body, there's six emotional effector patterns, these fundamental patterns that we all have.

09:22
It's a combination of emotion and breathing pattern and posture and facial expression and vocalization. All of these together create a particular emotional pattern. And so there's six that are kind of the fundamental ones, the bass set that we all have.

09:45
And of these six, five of them feature abdominal breathing.

09:53
and one of them features clavicular breathing. We won't get into the specifics of breathing in these ways, but you can kind of play with it, right? You can imagine air going down towards into your pelvis, filling your abdomen in all these directions, forward and to the sides, down and even up a bit.

10:18
You can breathe down there and just see how that affects how you think and how you feel.

10:28
You can breathe in through the nose, fill in down there. Right? What sort of state does this evoke? OK, cool. And then real gently, we're just going to play for a little bit. It can be a little uncomfortable trying this, but depending on who you are and your experience. So if you invite the air to come up into.

10:57
upper chest, you can even breathe in through your mouth and huh, maybe it's like a gasp, huh, huh. If you did that, even just a little bit, right?

11:11
How does that feel? What sort of experience? You don't have to do it very much at all. How much does that, what does that do to how you feel about yourself, how you feel about your potential? What you could do next? Or what would you have to do next?

11:32
Alright, cool. Just a little experiment. Go back down. You can bring it back down to the abdominal breathing.

11:43
Yeah, so with the emotional body, that's five of them in the abdominal breathing. Well, to me that just says, hey, breathing into the abdominal space is a big deal and it probably should be the default, right? Not that we have to force it so hard or anything like that, but like, what can we do to set ourselves up for success in terms of having this easy breath into the abdomen?

12:11
That's a question we can play with over time. All right, let's get back to the book. We're going back to paragraph number two. All right, this is the final paragraph here. I'll read it first as a whole and then line by line. And please, enjoy this by breathing into your abdomen. That'd be great. All right. Throughout the history of mankind, we find systems and rules designed to induce a calming effect.

12:41
by improved breathing. The human skeleton is so constructed that it is almost impossible to organize breathing properly without also satisfactorily placing the skeleton with respect to gravity. The reorganization of breathing alone succeeds only to the degree that we succeed indirectly

13:05
in improving the organization of the skeletal muscles for better standing and better movement. Okay, a lot of big ideas in there. So let's take it line by line and break it down. So the first line, throughout the history of mankind, we find systems and rules designed to induce a calming effect by improved breathing.

13:33
Yeah, definitely. I've heard of a lot of ways to breathe. If you go into some meditation app or some meditation class, you'll find that they'll offer some type of breathing, right? It might be even in, even out. Could be box breathing, if you've heard of that. So you breathe in for, let's say, two seconds. Breathe in, hold.

14:02
Breathe out, hold, all two seconds. It kind of creates a box. You can think of breathing in a circular fashion where it so evenly transitions in to out. There's also something like Wim Hof. That's a breathing technique to change your internal state, to calm yourself. So I'm actually really curious.

14:30
What are the particular styles that you've been taught how to breathe? Is it something through yoga or something else? What styles have you been taught? What are the ways you know how to breathe, so to speak? I would be really curious to hear. I invite you to send me a message at jeffrey at expa

14:54
Jeffrey at expa I'd love to hear from you. I'm really curious, how have you been taught to breathe? All right, back to the book. He says, the human skeleton is so constructed that it is almost impossible to organize breathing properly without also satisfactory placing the skeleton with respect to gravity. All right.

15:20
What does this mean? He's using a particular term. I don't know if it's a technical term from anatomy or something else, but it's very common in the Feldenkrais method. Very common. It's this term organize. He says, it's almost impossible to organize breathing properly. Organize, organize. Why organize? Well, we're

15:45
Well, we're organisms. We have organs. We organize ourselves. We do things. Our brain, our nervous system, all of this arranges our bones, our muscles. We move through space. And how we move through space can be very unique, very particular. And how is it organized? If you're

16:14
building a Lego toy thing, right? You're putting those blocks in place and then it becomes like a ship, right? The pieces are organized into that ship shape, right? So as you walk and breathe and all those activities of life, your bones, your muscles are organized through that movement to make that movement possible.

16:44
Okay, so he says if we want to organize breathing properly, which he doesn't define here, like what would be proper breathing.

16:55
So let's kind of think a little bit about proper breathing. So for Fuling Gresi, it was very much about adapting to the situation, not that you, you know, force a particular breathing pattern in a situation. Like the pattern needs to match, right? So if you're pushing that heavy door shut, right, does your breathing pattern support that? If you're speaking to someone at a far distance, does your breathing pattern...

17:25
support that projection. And I think, you know, a piece of this is that abdominal breathing, generally speaking, you know, when you don't have a need for something else, or a disturbance for something else, that you have an easy breath, that's relatively undisturbed by your movement. Okay.

17:53
So he says, you can't really have that without the skeleton being satisfactory placed in respect to gravity. OK, what do we mean here? So if you lose your balance, right, if you're on two feet, you could stand on two feet right now if you want, or just reflect and remember this sort of experience. If you stand on two feet.

18:21
and sense your breath.

18:26
and then shift over to one foot. Right. You just bring your weight over to start. Does that change your breath?

18:38
And then if you take off the floor, the one foot, so you're only onto the foot, right? You moved over to the side, you lift your other foot.

18:50
sense your breath. And what if you kind of move your way, you can kind of maybe bend forward or to the side where you can almost, almost lose your balance. Don't go too far, right? Or if you have a wall next to you, you can put your hand up to the wall to help you here so you don't actually fall or anything. But as you begin to lose your balance, it's going to affect your breath. Right? There might be this

19:20
this catching. Right. So as you lose your balance, the organization of your skeleton is changing, right? And it's maybe not so supportive, right? If you're going to about to fall, it's not supporting you, right? And that affects your breath. So if you take the logic and go the other way, increase the support through your skeleton.

19:50
it will free your breath. Yeah. As the skeleton bears more of your weight, your breath can be totally chill and doesn't need to hold on or clutch or anything like that. And that would be a better quality of breathing.

20:10
Okay, so let's get back to the book. He says the reorganization of breathing alone succeeds only to the degree that we succeed indirectly in improving the organization of the skeletal muscles for better standing and better movement. Okay, yeah, he's continuing on here with that point. So better breath, right? So if you focus on breathing and there's many ATM lessons that do focus.

20:38
on breathing in all these different ways, in all these ways you've probably never even thought you could breathe. There's so many variations, so many possibilities. And what he's talking about here is, yeah, if you focus on the breathing, whether an ATM, awareness to movement, or some other process, whether it's yoga or meditation,

21:02
If your breathing improves, it's because how you went about trying to improve your breathing indirectly also improved how your skeletal muscles are organized, how they're tonified, how they work to keep your skeleton in a shape that makes it so your breath improves, right? You've indirectly improved your skeletal position and thus your breath improved.

21:32
Right, so a better breath comes from the skeleton.

21:37
and the support within. Okay, cool. Well, that's the last line he has here on breathing. Breathing is movement. Breathing reflects who you are through and through. And it's something that we can also use to inform ourselves. We can change our breath and that will change our organization. So if breath is so essential to who we are and how we move,

22:06
and how we organize ourselves through our skeleton can influence our breath, then hey, that's a big deal. I mean, you can go for quite some time without food, some time without water, but you can't go very long without your breath. Your breath is always with you. So, a little bit better quality breath could be a big deal for your days, for your months, for your years.

22:36
Real briefly, before I let you go here, please check out the show notes. It's in your podcast player. You can go to the show notes and sign up for the newsletter. I'd love to have you there. You can learn about future opportunities to work with me and programs that I'll have going on. And there's also free downloadable to go with it.

23:00
And the final question I have for you is the question I asked you earlier. What are the ways you've been taught to breathe?

23:08
Whatever they are. I'd love to hear from you on this. Please send me an email. You can find that in the show notes, too What are the ways you've been taught to breathe and how do they help you? Thank you for your attention