bacteria strains. This would stop them from binding to the gut wall and, instead, flush them swiftly out of the colon before they can cause any serious or irreversible damage.
Professor Gibson, who co-built the first artificial colon in the UK, says:
It takes, on average, 70 hours for residual foodstuffs to pass through the colon where several hundred different species of bacteria are present. One important development and our real challenge now is that of synbiotics – where prebiotics and probiotics are combined in the same supplement.
Deprive the body of oxygen and, within minutes, you will die. Without the breath, there is no life.
If you weren’t breathing you’d be dead. Right? Of course. So why do you need to read anything about how to breathe? A newborn baby can do it without a self-help manual, so why devote an entire chapter of a book to something that should be so instinctive?
The reason is that somewhere between that first gasp of oxygen into our tiny infant lungs, growing up and becoming adults who barely have time to catch their breath between one task and the next, most of us have forgotten how to breathe properly.
During an average day, you will take 12 breaths a minute. That adds up to 17,280 breaths each and every day of your life. In a healthy person, the diagphragm is responsible for up to 70% of respiration, leaving the rest to the chest and other respiratory muscles. That means, if I ask you to take a deep breath and you puff out your chest, you are not breathing as nature intended, using the full and generous capacity of your lungs which, if spread over a flat surface, would cover an area roughly the size of a tennis court.
One theory which tries to explain the growing number of degenerative diseases people suffer in the West is that many of them are caused by insufficient oxygen reaching the body’s tissues and organs. In recent years, cosmetic and alternative therapies based on oxygen-therapies have mushroomed.
If you stop, right now, and simply become aware of your own breathing you will see how just by paying attention to something you normally do subconsciously, it automatically changes. Once you start to concentrate on your breath, it will probably slow down, which is what happens in deep relaxation and meditation. You may have a strong urge to sigh and release a build-up of tension that you have now only just become aware of, even though it has been there throughout the time you have been reading this.
Let go of this deep sigh but keep your mouth closed so that the air escapes down through the nose. Lots of people teach breathing techniques where you breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth. In yoga, which is where I re-learned how to breathe properly, we never let air in or out through the mouth but always rely on the nose, which has special filters or microvillae (minute hairs) to filter out pollutants and prevent the worst of them from getting into the lungs. It also means the air must travel further to reach the lungs and so gives it the chance to warm up to body temperature and humidity en route.
The fact is, we pay scant regard to our pattern of breathing throughout our normal daily activities, and it is only when someone brings it to our attention that we realise many of us ‘shallow breathe’ our way through life most of the time. Try to take that deeper breath and the chances are your shoulders will rise, you will puff out your chest and draw the air from somewhere in the region of the back of your throat.
This is because you are only using the upper regions of the lungs. What you should be doing is breathing in from the diaphragm. Unless you are a musician, you probably won’t know where this is, let alone how to use it, and because of this you will probably be using less than a third of your entire lung capacity.
Learning how to breathe properly again not only helps calm and quieten the mind but has also been shown to strengthen the immune system and improve the cardiovascular supply so that more oxygen is delivered around the body. People who run regularly, and so breathe deeply, also suffer all the usual age-related complaints at a much slower rate than non-runners.
Healthy lungs use only 3% of the body’s total energy. Diseased lungs will suck up more than a third of your energy reserves. Thankfully, learning to breathe properly is both enjoyable, since it is so soothing, and easy. As well as nourishing all our body’s tissues and fuelling it’s different systems, air keeps the mind sharp. The brain uses three times more oxygen than other organs, so if you are feeling sluggish, get breathing.
How to Breathe
A true breath starts by expanding the muscles of the diaphragm down and out. Then pushes them up and in again. This enables the lungs to expand to their full capacity, allows air to rush into them and helps it to be vigorously expelled. Breathing this way, even for a short while, is very re-energising.
Few forms of Western exercise attach any importance at all to how you breathe, but in yoga the breath and a rhythmic pattern of breathing is so important that a whole discipline is devoted to it: Pranayama. Prana means life and yama means it’s cessation.
The average volume of air you take in with a single breath is about 328 cubic centimetres. This can vary, of course, depending on your size, sex, posture, emotional and physical state and your environment. What the pranayama yogi teachers believe is that by re-learning how to breathe, you can increase this volume to 1640 cubic centimetres – a five-fold rise.
The lung tissues grow less elastic with age, but deep yogic breathing can reverse this deterioration and boost the body’s overall metabolism. It is so effective that there are now specialised Pranic healers who do nothing but teach the value of proper breathing to cleanse and strengthen the physical and spiritual body. The yogis believe that prana is a special, almost spiritual force which circulates with the oxygen and which travels through the body via a series of complex energy channels called the nadis. These are similar, in pattern, to our physical nerves and blood vessels but are governed by the chakras (see Chapter 10).
Yogic Breathing
In yoga, practitioners say that where the breath is, you’ll find the mind. What they mean is that if you can begin to control the breath, you can also begin to marshall the mind and free it from the stresses and strains of everyday life and it’s demands.
One of my favourite breathing exercises comes from the Sivananda discipline, one of the yoga schools which treat prana – the breath of life – with as much, if not more respect as the asanas or positions which are also practised to tone the body, cleanse the mind and massage the internal organs.
One of the simplest of these is called Anuloma Viloma, or alternate nostril breathing. It is very calming and helps rebalance energy throughout the body. There is no substitute here for experience, so try it and see how quickly you begin to feel back in tune with your body and, even better, re-energised.
Prepare by sitting comfortably on the floor. Try and keep the spine straight and, if you can sit in the lotus, half-lotus or cross-legged position, then do so. The important thing is to feel comfortable (sit on a chair if you like) so you can concentrate on the breathing instead of worrying, say, about that pain in your knee.
You must be careful how you seal off the right-hand nostril to start this breathing exercise. The yogis believe that different parts of the nostrils link subtly but directly with the chakras or energy centres in the body, and that clamping the nostril without regard for this can have an adverse effect.
Use the thumb and third finger of one hand to seal the nostril gently and remind yourself, before you start, there is no need for any force to be used. Now try it yourself.
To begin, gently seal the right-hand nostril with your thumb and breathe in through the left-hand nostril to a slow count of four. Hold the breath in the lungs while you switch to close the left-hand nostril with the third finger of your right hand, then release the air to a slow and controlled count of eight. Keep the left-hand nostril closed and breathe in through the right-hand side to a slow count of four. Hold the breath again as you switch nostrils and seal the right-hand side while you slowly release