What You Should be Trying to Achieve With Breath
Clarifying what the hell I'm talking about. SOFCast Newsletter, 04th September 2022.
Gents, still working on my no-self article no.2.
I apologise for the lack of posting. I recently spent a week and a half in the outback on a hunting trip without writing. More recently, events have conspired to use all my time, including some much-unneeded travel. But we're back at it now.
There's still some confusion about my assertions re. breath. The wordcels and philosophy-nuts continue to attaq me. These are the people that think reading, and even funnier - belief - will save them and the species. This is ironic, because clearly no one can read anything longer than a tweet about some faggoty moral issue. So I thought I'd clarify how everything interconnects and do away with such tom-foolery once and for all.
What should we be trying to achieve with breath?
There are 1001 methods of breathing. The Hindu types, hyper-ventilators that crap on about psychedelic bullshit, the Dutch ice lunatic...the list goes on. Many of these methods a sexy or sell you exoticism; mine is not.
In fact, mine is incredibly dull. It forces you to breathe according to the same tempo once or twice a day for 25 minutes. Worst of all, you're forced to focus on the body. Almost no one can do this for this long. This is part of the psychic plague of this species - the body-mind split.
And it's boring. Sunbeams will not shoot out of your arse, sexual energy won't blast throughout your endocrine system and Aphrodite won’t felate you. At least to start with.
For sure, I don't have a knack for marketing, but at least I'm honest. Our game, that is of my readers who are superior to these other types, is not running away from what we are.
Some of my prior articles on this matter are in a longer form and perhaps difficult to understand. I thought I would summarise what I believe breath does and how we can maximise personal biological resonance.
The common understanding of breathing is the facilitation of gaseous exchange; everyone knows this.
However, as we have shown, this is not the only case. Breathing also regulates Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) balance.
This became apparent to me during my research for the released Hara e-book. Breathing, particularly the diaphragm's movement, regulates the pulse of blood around the body. This is a crucial factor that almost no one knows about. Including our genius medical fraternity, who, as we all know, have shown themselves to be nothing but clowns the last few years.
Recent discoveries make it clear how breathing impacts the ANS. I took GSR readings of my autonomic function whilst using several types of breathing, including balanced energetic breathing, which I now believe to be the most effective way to maximise the blood pulse and regulate autonomic balance.
Blood pulse circulatory waves, and ensuing autonomic balance, are best reflected in Heart Rate Variability (HRV). The better your HRV, the better your ANS balance. HRV is downstream of ANS balance. ANS balance is downstream of breathing with the correct tempo and depth. The extent of the diaphragm's fall and rise maximise blood circulation through increasing thoracic pressures - the mechanism in which blood is pushed through the heart and vascular system.
Someone with a poor ANS function will rely on the heart entirely. This leads to heart problems and a constant invariable heart rate. Athletes that train too hard often suffer from this. In turn, low HRV is inversely correlated with a too regular tempo of heart rate.
What is happening? The body is not using the breath and thoracic pressure to push blood around the body and reduce the burden on the heart, leading to low HRV. High HRV indicates that the load on the heart is balanced. For this reason, many athletes now use HRV measurements to decide when they should train and rest.
HRV is associated with all-cause mortality more than any other biometric. Poor HRV is associated very highly with all-cause mortality. Excellent HRV has the opposite correlation. Therefore, we can infer that Autonomic Balance is key to many critical health cascades in the body. Autonomic balance governs all subconscious elements of the mind and the body. Every component of our health and well-being.
Therefore, ANS balance is key to just about every conceivable element of our health.
On the one hand, we have the so-called sympathetic nervous system - the accelerator or activating force. And the parasympathetic nervous system, the decelerating force. While it is not this simple in reality (there are numerous crossovers to almost render this metaphor kind of meaningless), this is nevertheless generally true. In a mechanistic analogy, we are like a car. We can put on the accelerator or the brakes, or we can drive at a level, safe speed.
Most people are chronically sympathetic activated. Therefore their autonomic balance is out of kilter. Most activities we engage in are sympathetic dominant. Most people I have measured so far have a very poor HRV.
I have recently bought some equipment and have been using it on myself and others to measure HRV, skin response, and electroencephalogram readings. I unequivocally confirm that sympathetic dominant readings correlate universally with high stimulation, overtraining or severe stress, and impaired breathing.
As soon as I introduce breathing to a specific tempo and timing, sympathetic responses almost instantaneously change. I look for several things that I will describe in later articles. I can read this through HRV, blood pulse wave measurements, GSR data measuring the decline in sympathetic responses, and brain wave activity. When proper breathing occurs, all these markers indicate a rapid change in ANS function. A few people have actually fallen asleep. This is an excellent sign if a stressed person has this reaction at first.
HRV is nevertheless the most important indicator. Over a month, I have changed 1 person's autonomic balance for good, as indicated by their HRV measurements. They reported significant changes in their subjective experience. HRV takes time to change; however, you can create a general improvement over time.
When I say being overstimulated is terrible - I mean it from this perspective.
A physical perspective. I pick on Twitter because it is my own weak point. But really, any compulsive activity that induces a sense of powerlessness, stress or hopelessness is self-diminishing and is reflected in the lack of ANS balance.
When a person introduces proper breathing, thoughts often totally disappear. They are no longer harangued by language and symbol use. The "self-delusion" associated with the Default Mode Network - the area of the brain scientists believe responsible for the sense of self, I think is gradually disempowered with these patterns of breath. I firmly believe that a solid overweening sense of self stands in the way of true vitalism. Everyone I know who is anxious and depressed runs compulsive self-narratives. They are utterly self-obsessed. This mirage can be seen through using breath and mindfulness. It is like being in a desert; the closer one observes the mirage, the more it disappears.
Each time we remain silent and breathe properly, we are "powering down" the influence of the Default Mode Network and its functions and by-products.
The actual hack, therefore, is to ensure that the cardio-pulmonary system is operating at peak efficiency. All the biometrics are telling me this unequivocally.
This is resonance, a topic I discussed in a prior newsletter. Peak resonance is achieved by all these mechanisms operating in harmony and at peak efficiency.
Non-resonance results in compulsive wordcels, theorycels, Internet addicts, acting and living in their imaginations instead of the real world. I now see this as a primary function of chronic sympathetic dominance. The same with blood pressure, arrhythmias, anxiety, mental illness and depression, whatever - the list goes on and on. Our modern world in its entirety can be seen this way. A result of compulsive sympathetic activity.
So the choice is simple:
Chronically accelerate all the time, have a terrible life and die young or chronic illness.
Or decelerate and balance, improve all your health markers, and be relaxed and centred in reality, in the real world (or the realer world). Don't talk about vitality; that's completely and utterly worthless. Encapsulate it. And now we can.
Will anyone do the work? Probably not.
No-self article part 2 I'm still working on; my apologies. Short on time recently.
Best,
A...Marmaduke
Well said. A while back I was seeking existential answers and ended up feeling like I could never catch up to the "wisdom". Example: Gurdjieff, Castaneda, esoteric stuff.
I thought that I had to try harder, which didn't work. Harder is not stronger, if it is not coherent.
I stopped trying and just did what little things helped, like little meditations and watchfulness.
After some time, I realized that even Gurdjieff was trying to teach this. He would put crazy physical exercises on his followers to see if/when they would stand up for their own bodies.
Sadly, like the wordcels etc, most of them just kept chugging with the "work", not noticing that they weren't trying to find themselves, but find someone or some rituals (or idealology) to follow.
I have seen in myself that there's a part that ignores the simple answers in favor of complexity.
That's the time that I remind myself that beginners mind is the way. Follow the body, not the mind.
Thank you for this - truly.