About Breathing

合氣道光氣会 Aikido Kokikai Japan News 

2020-11-1 

Shudō Maruyama, Founder and President 

About Breathing (呼吸法 kokyūhō) 

It has long been said that the breath of people with stable minds is long. Conversely, the breath of people with unstable minds is short and rough. 

In Japanese, to live a long life is “nagaku ikiru” [長く生きる], which sounds a lot like to breathe a long breath, ”nagaku iki wo suru” [長く息をする]. When you breathe long breaths, it’s good for your health, so if you want to live a long life, practice breathing long breaths. 

The average person takes 15 to 16 breaths per minute, while a fast breather takes 25 to 26. Whether your breathing is correct or not makes a huge difference over a lifetime, from morning to night, every day. Humans eat food and burn it to convert it to energy. We breathe in order to take in the oxygen needed for this “combustion.” The combustion doesn’t take place in the lungs. Combustion takes place all over the body. From a medical perspective, the process of inhaling air from the environment into the lungs and then exhaling is called external respiration or pulmonary respiration. Oxygen reaching the lungs is sent all over the body where the combustion, or metabolism, takes place. The resulting carbon dioxide and other impurities are carried back to the lungs. That is called internal respiration. The combination of internal and external respiration is called whole body breathing. It is this whole body breathing that’s important. 

Simple pulmonary respiration is not good for the body. The air in the lungs becomes clean in five or six breaths. The air in a room can be changed by opening a window for just a little while. But even if the air in the lungs gets changed it is not useful unless its oxygen is transported all over the body. Modern people are irritated, scraping by, and constantly worrying, causing constriction of the

capillaries. For that reason, just as when there’s a traffic jam on the freeway and cars can’t get on or off, carbon dioxide can permeate the body, leading to incomplete combustion. This unfortunate process leads to a decline in vitality. To prevent that from happening, we need to strengthen our vital life force. Eliminating carbon dioxide and delivering oxygen to the whole body is good for doing so. Then, we can burn our food completely. If we neglect this, we won’t know which parts of our bodies we are degrading, like living with a time bomb. 

Correct breathing is important for living a long, healthy life. 

In Kokikai Aikido, we practice things like how to relax correctly, keep one point, and prevent our minds from becoming disturbed, no matter what kind of challenge faces us. 

(translated by Barbara Litt, with assistance from Dave Nachman and Steve Syrek)