The Gentle Breath

I have begun to change the way I do breathwork in a tantric massage session, at least at the start. In the West, we tend to breathe very poorly. Our lives are so busy, stressful, effortful and over-peopled that our natural breath has become increasingly distorted. We overbreathe and underbreathe, we don't know whether we should breathe through the nose or the mouth, we breathe up in the chest when everyone tells us we should belly breathe but that often feels so unnatural and stressful we just return to our nice familiar shallow breath as soon as we can. (Trick: lie down, put a book on your tummy and raise it up and down with your breathing)

One of the things we learn in the West is that we are not good enough as we are and so from an early age we 'try very hard'. Many clients when they first sit down and I ask them to focus on or deepen their breath is to 'try really hard'. I do this too by the way. I take big, deep, effortful breaths that send my body haywire! Right at the beginning, a few big, conscious breaths are great – the Lion's Breath is exactly that, a big inhale through the nose and a roaring exhale from the mouth so we can get rid of all that stress that got us into the room – traffic, work, nerves and walking to the front door.

To begin to enter a more healing space we want our breathing to become genuinely deeper, more relaxed and relaxing. Slow and mindful. However, effort, endeavour and doing things properly are hard habits to break, so after observing my clients' temptation to over-exert when doing breathwork and also in observing my own physical stress response when attempting breathwork with the focus on slowing it down, breathing for set amounts of time or trying to make it 'deeper', I changed the approach I use to focus more on the quality of the breath.

Nitric oxide - one of the chemicals responsible for penile erection - is produced through a soft nasal inhale (mouth breathing doesn't stimulate NO). A gentle inhale is not going to produce enough nitric oxide to cure erectile dysfunction, but it does play a part and of course breathing well lowers cortisol, increases blood flow and activates the vagus nerve. It also changes the nature of our attention (and intention) from goal (eg a Wim Hof style perfect technical breath) to experience – how does it feel to breathe ever so softly, how does a very delicate gentle inhale change our appreciation of the very act of breathing and of the gift of air, how does it feel to just that the air fall out of the body on the exhale or appreciate that it is removing tension from the body? By focusing on the experience, I find that clients naturally and without effort begin to breathe deeper and slower and increasingly from the diaphragm/belly, especially once they are lying in a relaxed position.

When we focus on the experience and quality of our breathing, I believe we have a better chance of relaxing and softening into a tantric massage and really exploring the possibilities of connectedness, softness, healing and blissful arousal that it can offer us. And it also correlates to our Western approach to orgasm as opposed to the tantric: when we have ejaculation and numbers of ejaculations as the goal, it can add stress into the sexual experience that in some cases can produce the opposite of what we want, but when we focus on the quality of the intimacy, whether or not we ejaculate as a result of that intimacy, then we are beginning to become tantric lovers indeed.