Breathe in, Breathe out

A powerful tool to help you master your nervous system or another biohacking buzzword? SIMONE DHONDY explores the inhalations and exhalations of breathwork

- SIMONE DHONDY

I'd often tease my asthmatic brother that he struggles with the one thing human beings were designed to do: breathe. If you think about it, from your first breath to your last, it's really all you do. In, out, in again and round we go. After a while we forget we're even doing it, which might be the biggest problem. In the Chinese Whispers of evolution, we seemed to have missed a link, only to realise we're just not doing it right anymore. But what if certain techniques could make that primordial atavism start up again? What if we could perfect our breath? Perhaps this thought is what sparked the latest buzzword in the biohacking lexicon: breathwork. Ever since covid declared war on people's lungs, everybody decided to wake up and smell, well, something. My own encounter started over a decade ago with yoga. While I could contort myself into poses, holding them for extended periods was another matter altogether.

"For the mind, through the body," Shirley Khajotia, my yoga teacher, suggested as the soundest approach for my particular strain of hyperactivity. The catalyst? My prana, or life force, or breath. Shvasa pravasa, the first step in pranayama, is the breathing arm of the practice. While pranayama deals with higher notions according to the yogic texts, what we're concerned with is the four-part anatomy of a breath: the inhalation, the gap between the inhalation and the exhalation, the exhalation, and the gap between the exhalation and the next consecutive inhalation. By playing around with the length of each-shortening one, elongating another or even suspending and retaining, we begin the journey of mastering our life force.