These days, it is common knowledge that breathing through the nose is much better for our health and many other physiological functions. Recent studies indicate that nose breathing (as opposed to mouth breathing) improves, memory, cognitive function, lung function, nitrous oxide production, circulation, and oxygen delivery throughout the body, to name a few. An impressive array of reasons to breathe through one’s nose!
Breathing is one of our oldest, deepest and most conditioned coordination patterns. If we have created a habit of mouth breathing and wish to change this pattern, we can approach it the way that we would change any other coordination pattern.
Our daily movement patterns are organized through a mostly unconscious process where our brain draws information from our history, our emotions, our sensory input, and the meaning that we have created about the context in which we are moving, to bring forth the unique combination of coordination that creates our movement.
When we wish to call forth a different quality of movement, we need to give different information to our “movement brain” (a term coined by my colleague Kevin Frank, to refer to the various parts of our brain that participate in the interactive process of movement). Willing ourselves to perform a different quality of movement from an idea of what movement should be or look like, is a minimally effective path for calling forth new possibilities. Imposition by force of will works only as long as we are willing to police ourselves. On the other hand, opening our awareness to different ways of orienting, of being present in our environment, or of engaging with that which surrounds us, especially when it calls forth a sense of deeper ease and aliveness, will automatically rewire our habitual movement in a way that requires no policing, only willingness to return again and again to the new quality of awareness.
So it is with nasal breathing. If we decide that now it is time to breathe through our noses, we may find ourselves sucking air in through our nostrils, often narrowing them in the process, and creating a paradoxical pattern of breathing, where we make the very activity that we wish to support more difficult by our efforts.
Creating the habit of breathing through the nose, if it is not to be a constant act of will, incites us to find a different way of engaging with our world, beginning with reconnecting to our sense of smell.
Smell is a frequently inhibited sense in our modern world. In our “civilized” culture, we are encouraged to mask the smells of our bodies with perfumes, and to close our noses to the odors associated with their natural processes. Sex and death, are two of our most taboo subjects, and each of them takes us back to our sense of smell in a profoundly instinctual way.
Our sense of smell connects us to our intuition (when our inner knowing tells us that something is wrong, for example, we say that “this doesn’t smell right”) and is also related to our oldest, most emotional memories.
So, when we wish to invite our nasal breathing to come back online, we can start by redefining our relationship to our sense of smell.
As my movement mentor, Hubert Godard points out, similar to vision, hearing and touch, we also have two pathways for processing olfactory information, a more active and a more receptive one. We can go after the smells, by sniffing and searching (think of the last time that you knew the cat had peed in a room of your house and you went looking for it by sniffing in all the corners) or we can allow the different scents to come to us. When we actively go after an olfactory stimulus, we usually narrow our nostrils and pull the air in through them. Our face tightens and narrows and often our brow furrows as well. The act of seeking out focuses our attention and narrows not only our physical apparatus but our kinesphere (field of presence in space) as well.
When we utilize our more receptive sensory channels, instead of narrowing, we widen. We allow the molecules of smell to come into our noses instead of actively pursuing them.
When we inhale the perfume of a rose in bloom, or some other smell that is deeply pleasurable to us, our sensory action is more of an allowing than a grasping. We allow our nostrils to dilate. We allow the sinuses of our faces to open and we receive the scent. We allow ourselves to be touched by the smell.
It is this quality of allowing and of receiving, that is the key to a nasal breathing that is an act of willingness instead of will, an act of attention instead of an act of tension.
When we open to receive the unique tapestry of smells that surrounds us, we find that we begin to breathe through our noses spontaneously and easily and that from this quality of presence, all the many benefits of nasal breathing ensue.
Naturally, this way of being present with our sense of smell, involves a willingness to interact with our world in a different way. Allowing ourselves to be touched by the smells around us, means that we engage with our environment in a more personal way. It is not as easy to pass through life immune to its many textures and flavors. It is not as easy to ignore the unpleasant smells of polluted cities and waters, or the smell of illness that may linger around some one that we meet. Likewise, we can find ourselves moved by the smell of the ocean spray on a windy day, by the perfume of a flower or the smell that resides in a baby’s fine, silky hair. Being open to Life’s many smells means being willing to embrace life more deeply, in all of its facets.
And maybe this is what gives us the possibility of being more fully human.