Breathing and Movement OR-01.TXT ************************************************************************ Breathing is the most basic fuction of your body. Without it all other systems of the body fail. It is the first internal self-supporting activity your body performs when you enter the world. However, you probably take this important activity entirely for granted. This book assumes you have never thought about breathing and sex together, and have never realized the central role the breath plays in your sex life. To a certain extent you easily have control of your breath. The relationship between it and other fuctions and activites of your body if quite complex. I want to talk here only about breathing, movement and emotion, and what they have to do with sex. Breathing is directly related to emotion. Any emotional response you have will immediatly change your breathing pattern. Conversely, by consciously changing your breathing, you can alter your emotion and feelings. Many relaxation techniques (and yoga exercises) are based on this principle. Excitement, the opposite of relaxation, is also achieved by altering the breathing pattern. This is what my exercised are designed to do. One result of doing the exercises is that you will have more energy or "charge" available to you during intercourse. This increased charge will result in a more intense orgasm. Body movements are also closely associated with emotions. It is possible to alter your feelings by changing the way you move. For example, if you dance, you may begin to feel happy. When you feel depressed and down, you shoulder slope and slouch. It is almost impossible to be depressed and stand with you shoulders back and your chest out. So both movement and breathing are directly related to emotions. That is, the way you breathe and the way you move both affect the way you feel, and vice versa. This principle will obviously apply to your sexual feelings and how you express them. When you study the mechanics of an orgasm, you that proper breathing and movemnet will lead you to an emotional high and set up the conditions necessary to trigger your orgastic reflex. The exercises in this book will guide you into this proper breathing and movement, which you will experience as an undulation wave that flows up and down your body. They will increase your excitemnet, sprreading it over your entire torso, arms and legs. Working with another person, you will learn hnow to maintain this rhythm and charge in their presence. One assumes that Natural Man or Woman, completely relaxed and centered always in the present (an entity I've yet to meet), would have no energy blocks and no trouble building his or her charge to a total orgasm. One further assumes that I will have to learn how to pay attention to where we block energy in out bodies, where we hold on emotionally, where we store tension, and what patterns we have developed in both breathing and movement which disrupt and frustate our natural responses, preventing us from reaching our orgastic potential. In this book I use the term excitemnet to cover the heightened energy mobilization that occurs in your body when there's a strong convern or a strong "contact," an aggressive felling, anticipation, joy, etc. With growing excitement there's always an increase of the metabolic process (oxidizing stored nutrients in the body) so you need more air. Since breathing is the most sensitive measure of any emotional experience, it is important that you respond to your increased excitement by increasing the rate and amplitude of your breathing. But instead, many people attempt to control their excitement, thereby interferring with their breathing, by keeping themselves "calm, cool and collected." The reason people tend to hold their breath is that breathing deeply and fully amplifies their feelings, and these feelings, which are often uncomfortable, are brought forcibly to their attention. Unfortunaely, restricting the breath to repress uncomfortable feelings leads to the restriction of pleasurable feelings as well. The subjective experience of a breathing difficulty caused by a person's attempt to control his or her excitement is one description of anxiety. It is the experience of wanting to get air into lungs which are immobilized by muscular constrictions of the chest and diaphragm. The word "anxiety" comes from angust - narrowness - which describes the condition of the involuntarily-constricted chest. It is apparent, throught observation of other members of the animal kingdom, that any organism which is suddenly frightened will halt its movements and its breathing, and freeze. Think of the startled reflex of a rabbit or deer that has been surprised along a road. We humans also use this primitive life-preserving instinct whenever our sudden, full attention is needed. At such times the very sounds and muscular movements that go with breathing are a source of distraction, so we try to get rid of them, either by breathing shallowly or by holding our breath. One may extend this emergency behavior indefinitely - or shift it to control other forms of excitement, for example, sexual excitement. Whenever you try to "control" yourself, you automatically restrict your body movement. You hold yourself rigid in order to prevent even minute movements, and this rigidity prevents you from feeling your feelings as well, because movement is feeling. Earlier I suggested you try an exercise for rotating your pelvis in a circular motion. When most people do this movement they hold their breath. During sexual excitement thek breath is affected the same way; it frequently gets shut down just when more air is needed. Movement is a natural part of being alive. The more alive your are, the more spontaneous your movements, and your body can naturally express your feelings. In the absence of movement there is no feeling. You lose your ability to feel in a limb which is immobilized, and you must move it again to regain the feeling. Since the depth of your breathing affects the intensity of your feeling, suppressed feeling can be revived through breathing. Death is no movement, no breathing, no feeling. To be wholly alive is to breathe deeply, feel deeply and move freely. It is possible to complete an action - walking across the floor, for instance - with little or no effort, smoothly, almost like gliding. A trained dancer or a Zen monk often gives this appearance; each movement is coordinated and no motion is wasted. There is a joy in observind this kind of movement - and an inner joy in being able to move that way. It is also possible to cross the same space and, by using a lot of unnecessary muscles and expressing great effort, make the journey very difficult. When you observe this type of movement in someone, you no doubt feel their strain. In making love there can be a smooth and flowing movement reaching a crescendo of exitement, then gradually decreasing to stillness and complete satisfaction. Or, you can hold on from the very beginning, not only by failing to breathe properly, but also with exaggerated facial expressions, tensions in the back and neck, hanging on to your partner or the bed with hands, legs, and feet, or onto yourself in the abdomen, buttocks or anus. This excess effort interfered with total orgastic release. Simply put, any restriciton of your breathing or your movements during love-makeing will rob you of sexual pleasure. The type of breathing that I want to encourage you to try in these exercises is called diaphragmatic breathing. With this type of breathing you get a maximum amount of air with a minimum amount of effort, using both your chest and your abdomen. The diaphragm is pulled down, the chest is expanded and the belly is pushed out, putting the greatest possible volume of air into the lungs. For some people the problem is not a lack of air intake, but a falure to allow all the air to be exhaled again, or to allow the chest to relax enough so that the air can be completely expelled. Breathing out is very much like "letting go." It is a passive procedure allowed by releasing the muscles in the chest and abdomen. If that musculature is not released fully, but is head in tension, some air is retained in the lungs and subsequent inhalation is restricted. Breathing is not just inhaling, it is a full cycle of inhaling and exhaling. Each person has his or her own characteristic way of breathing and holding the breath. One way of breathing is in uneven spurts, as if bumping down a staircase, or along a rough road. This type of brathing initiated in the ego and requires a deliberate effort to maintain. As one become more relaxed and "out of mind," his breathing smoothes out. In proper development, the breath follows a definite smooth rhythm, unless hampered by the position of the body. That is, you always breathe deeply and fully in spite of any work effort you expend. In a healthy body, rhythmical pevic movement is an intergral part of breathing. Therefore, you will find that my exercises emphasize helping you learn how to coordinate your pelvic movemnet and your breathing together. The rhythm of sex requires an exhalation with every forward swing of the pelvis. If you inhale during forward movement, your diaphragm contracts and prevents the "letting go" in the abdomen necessary for orgastic release. Further, if you hold your pelvis rigidly, proper breathing can't take place, because the pelvis participates in every breath cycle. In the exercises for pelvic rocking, you will practice this principle. To check out your own breathing pattern, you must first figuare out how you stop yourself from making a complete or full exhalation; that is, how you use muscle contractions to inhibit a full exhalation. In the exercises, I call this training the breathing pattern. The work is slow, and a great deal of concentration is required to pay attention to how you're moving and how your're breathing. You will find that you progress in steps or levels; you'll periodically reach a plateau where nothing seems to be happening, when all of a sudden you will break through and move on from there. Your problem will lie in trying to go too fast, and in going beyond your body's level of tolerance for the increased oxygenation and increased feelings that come with "letting go" and with deeper breathing. Therefore, while at first it may seem as if little is happening to you, you have to allow time for your body to overcome its old patterns. As you work through the exercises, you may find that each new one brings a new flood of emotions, which interrupts your newly established smooth-breathing and moving pattern. This is what you should look for and pay attention to. What is happening is that your body is "letting go" of an old pattern of tension. The emotion you feel is energy released as the pattern is broken. You will want to stay with the emotion until it subsides, to allow it to be expressed fully. When a new emotion comes up, stop, go back to a place in the exercise sequence that feels confortable and move throught the sequence again from this safe, comfortable place, watching your breathing pattern closely. Remember, your breathing is your "feeling thermometer," so pay close attention to it. As you start breathing deply, you'll probably notice some new body sensations. Incariably you will develop tingling sensations in various parts of your body, usually starting in the hands, feet and face (particularly around the mouth) and very often extending over the whole body. These tingling sensations, if encouraged by excessive breathing, can become intense, and feeling of numbness can occur. Such sensations are known as "paresthesia" in medicine and are sometimes seen as symptoms of hyperventilation. Hyperventilation occurs when too much carbon dioxide is dischraged from the blood, due to a rapidly increased breathing rate. In our work there's more chance that your body will get overcharged with oxygen which it is unable to utilize, and for this reason you may experience some dizziness or numbness to which you are not accustomed. Whether this phenomenon is hyperventilation or over-oxygenation is irrelevant. It is important that excess breathing be avoided. These exercises require only minimal amounts of oxygenation; only the slightest amount of sensation or tingling is necessary to begin and maintain the activation of simulated sexual feelings - any stress on the body through breathing should only be done with a competent therapist present who is familiar with this type of work. People who are actively working or exercising regularly are not as likely to develop these symptoms. If you do, you will find that the sensations, emerging during the exercises, will usually disappear as soon as your breathing is relaxed and slows down. This phenomenon is completely under your control. Don't push yourself; there is no hurry. You are better off if you learn to tolerate the sensation that is you push youself and create an emotional resistance (i.e. you become afraid) that will be difficult to overcome latter. As you begin to develop the capacity to tolerate higher level of excitation and oxygenation through proper breathing, the dizzinmess and the tingling will tend to diminish and disapper, leaving only a "charge" of energy. These feelings of excitationm are very similar to the feelings of excitement that go along with an orgasm. Thus you will be allowing yourself to toletate more excitement - without shutting it off - by concentrating on your breathing. The final step in the exercises it to allow your newly released energy or "charge" to be focused into your orgastic experience. This required unifying the body's feelings. When you are caught up in sexual excitement, it is possible to dissipate or waste your energy. My exercises on grounding prevent this energy loss by focusing your excitement in your feet and legs, and their relation to the earth or something solid. It is as though the energy travels down your body, reaches the ground, is captured or collected, then bounces up your legs again, making itself available for your orgasm. If you are patient with these exercises, they can open you body to your energy flow, and help you develop a higher level of exciation, which will result in increased body pleasure and more life for you. It will be worth your efforts!