TAOIST LONGEVITY BREATHING TECHNIQUE -- TURTLE BREATHING

[Pravin Kumar]

Taoist Longevity Breathing is the foundation of all Taoist chi development and
longevity practices, including qigong, tai chi, bagua, Taoist yoga and Taoist meditation.

Learning to breath properly is one of the most important portals to healing,
relaxation, rejuvenating sleep, graceful aging and spirituality.

Taoist Longevity Breathing goes beyond increasing oxygen capacity. Longevity
Breathing will help you rejuvenate and supercharge not only your lungs, but also all your
internal organs. It improves circulation, increases performance and reduces stress. It also
helps you cope with negative emotions, such as fear and anger.


How can you improve your breathing? Taoist Longevity Breathing, is a progressive
system for better breathing:

1.Learn practices that release and unfreeze the diaphragm
2.Activate all parts of your belly (lower, middle and upper)
3.Begin coordinating the diaphragm and belly
4.Smooth out your breath so it is even and smooth
5.Start to activate other areas of your body with breathing.

As you are activating these different areas of your body, you will simultaneouly
lengthening your breath. With each new activated body part, it becomes easier to extend your
breath.


Contrary to what most people believe, it is not your lungs that activate air intake.

The diaphragm is responsible for moving air in and out of your lungs. So Taoist
Longevity Breathing initially focuses on your diaphragm since it's the starting point of
breathing. However, for most people their diaphragm is not only frozen, but they also cannot
feel it! Do you know where your diaphragm is located? How does it function?

The diaphragm is a bell-shaped sheet of muscle that separates your lungs from your
entire abdomen. It wraps around the lower parts of your ribcage and attaches to your spine.
Your diaphragm moves when you breathe. The bell shape flattens and your chest cavity and lungs
expand and draw in air.

The Location of the Diaphragm **

When your diaphragm relaxes and resumes its bell shape, your chest gets smaller,
causing air to be pushed out of your lungs. If your diaphragm does not move very much as you
breathe, you cannot take in or expel much air in a single breath.

Your diaphragm influences a complex variety of interconnected anatomical parts--upward
to your head, neck and shoulders and downward towards the bottom of your pelvis--to move in
coordination with it.

Spongy, springy ligaments connect your diaphragm to your internal organs and cause
them to move in coordination with your breathing. For example, if your diaphragm moves well,
it also makes your liver move well. If the movements of your diaphragm are poor, it can cause
the ligaments that connect to your liver to lose function. A poorly functioning liver will
compromise all the other internal organs.

Your body has several internal fluid-pumping mechanisms, which are directly
connected to the movement of your diaphragm. Strong fluid movement is especially important for
your internal organs, joints and spine. Poor movement of your diaphragm compromises the smooth
flow of these fluids.

Taoist Longevity Breathing exercises will help your diaphragm to move more
strongly and train habits of long, robust and deep breathing.


Soft, springy ligaments connect your diaphragm to your internal organs and help them
function and move the way nature intended. For example, if muscles are flaccid where ligaments
connect to the liver, both the ligaments and the liver itself will move progressively less or
even get stuck and barely move at all. This can, in a cascading effect, compromise the
movements of your other organs.

Since many of the fluid-pumping mechanisms of your body are connected to the movement
of your diaphragm, poor or unbalanced movement of your diaphragm compromises these flows.
Strong, rhythmic up and down motions of the diaphragm benefit and regularize these pumping
actions.

Breathing with your belly strengthens your diaphragm. However, the breathing technique
must be learned systematically and gradually, and should only be done with an instructor
skilled in monitoring these progressive stages. The connections between your diaphragm and
heart, if excessively forced, could get overstretched or dislodged.

Within Taoist Longevity Breathing, there are specific exercises for making sure that
your entire diaphragm muscle moves as a whole while exhaling and inhaling. No part of the
muscle movement should be significantly stronger or weaker than another.

Another set of exercises within Taoist Longevity Breathing will teach you to lengthen
and stretch your diaphragm as you inhale and exhale. Still other exercises will teach you to
feel your diaphragm clearly and evenly during breathing to gradually increase and release
pressure while evenly inhaling-exhaling.


As you start to exercise your diaphragm more, you can then move onto more advanced
Taoist Longevity Breathing techniques to activate all the parts of your body. These breathing
techniques essentially reprogram your nervous system to breathe with your whole body 24 hours
a day.

Eventually, Taoist Longevity Breathing will help you activate your entire body, including:

- Belly
- Sides, spleen and liver
- Lower back
- Kidneys
- Upper back
- Brain.

As you activate different parts of your body with Taoist Longevity Breathing, you will
simultaneously lengthen your breath. Increasing the length of your breath with Taoist
Longevity Breathing will ensure that you move your belly and relax all the parts of your body.
If you are tense or taking shallow gulps of air, then it is impossible to have a long breath.

Taoist Longevity Breathing never holds the breath for any reason. The aim is to
continuously and evenly breathe at a very slow pace. There are three distinct stages you will
go through as you learn Taoist Longevity Breathing:

Stage 1 : 30 Second Breath

Over millennia, Taoists observed that a thirty-second breath was the minimum an average
person should be able to do if he or she wanted to breathe well under normal circumstances.
Yet given today's low standards where having a weak, shallow breath is considered normal,
being able to easily do a thirty-second breath may sound difficult to achieve.

However, since you will take countless breaths from this day forward in your life,
meeting this challenge will immeasurably better your life. As a point of reference, we
estimate that the average person has between a three- and seven-second breath. So by training
yourself to maintain a 30-second breath, over time you'd increase the length of your breath by
at least 400 percent!

Stage 2 : Two Minute Breath

Taoists also observed that the body made a positive and profound life-altering shift
when practitioners could extend their breath to two minutes. This causes major changes in the
body and positively resets many of the body's energetic baselines. For example, the
circulatory and nervous systems shift to another level of capability, which most people don't
even know exists. Even if this ability is maintained only for a year, it usually causes a
beneficial effect that lasts for decades. This ability can allow the practitioner to regularly
shrug off stress that would otherwise be overwhelming and cause misery and poor health.

Stage 3 : - Turtle Breathing

Taoists were greatly concerned with promoting longevity and became renowned
for their longevity practices. An essential component of their most successful longevity
techniques os called "turtle breathing," which is an eight-minute breath. Giant turtles are
known to live for hundreds of years. They commonly submerge themselves in the water and hold
their breath for more than five minutes at a time.

One breathing aspect of Taoist breathing is aiming to generate a five- to eight-minute
breaths. This practice is unsurpassed in its ability to transform and maintain the vitality
of youth as the body and mind age.