[Music] the basis for all breath work within taoism is that it should be based upon deep abdominal breathing or as we say uh within my school the breath should be anchored okay meaning the breath should be naturally anchored very low um into the abdominal region so that your abdominal cavity is is fully opening and closing when you breathe you know most people will know what abdominal breathing is who's who've been involved in those these arts but i think what sometimes people miss is that in order for you to abdominally breathe there's kind of three parts to it right because you have the kind of you have the muscular movement of the body obviously with a diaphragm going down and the um and the the abdominal space expanding on the inhalation generally but then you also have the sinking of the breath which really means the sinking of the chi that should go with that muscular movement but doesn't always there's also the sinking of the mind like where is the focal point for your mind when you just relax like your sort of mental energy if i just sort of let it go placid where does it go does it go to my brain does it go to my heart like like what you know and a lot of people's energy and a lot of people's mind is too too high anchor to too high in the body or that's how we view it in qigong now if you think about what what happens if your energy is too high or your mind is too high it very much corresponds with the kind of stress level on the nervous system so the higher the breath the higher the mind the more highly strong your your nervous system is so it puts you into a state of fight or flight really a state of stress and if you're in a state of stress you're in a state of fight or flight there's no way the chi is going to sink and this is kind of the route of so many of the internal arts whether it be qigong or negong alchemy tai chi it doesn't matter the now a lot of people try to sink the chi using the breath by kind of forcing abdominal breathing you know so they kind of they breathe into the hands or they put their back on a wall and try to breathe into the wall pressing their kidneys into the wall or lay on the floor and breathe into the ground or whatever you know trying to control their breath to sink it down um and actually these methods are a little bit flawed because they don't adhere to one of the major taoist rules which is that you shouldn't really ever try to do anything and i don't mean be lazy but i mean you don't those kind of things are overly contrived they're overly governing on the body and that's not really what we're trying to do because the problem is that they use a kind of intention the intention of breathing low but the very act of using your intention raises the chi so you end up with a very curious state where people who do this kind of forced abdominal breathing breathing low they end up getting the muscles to go down but the cheese stays high and the mind stays high the energy stays high so still the chi doesn't sink so i've met people who've done years and years of what they think is abdominal breathing but they're still stressed they're still highly strong and they still can't sink the chi because they kind of separated these aspects of the breathing apart the muscularity of it the muscular breathing and the energy and the mind of pulled apart and we want them to move together and sink so we follow the kind of taoist principle of none doing or non-governance and we achieve this by applying attention instead of intention to the bodily processes of breathing this is what we're trying to do so the idea is that if you give your attention to something like unwavering attention pure attention to something that is developing it's nourishing so the more i give attention to that thing whether it be a child that's growing or or your own bodily process the very act of giving it your full attention means that it actually evolves in the direction it's supposed to go it's nourishing whereas i've given my intention i'm kind of forcing and contriving and that creates a kind of stagnation that is the problem so in order to learn to anchor the breath to correct abdominal breathing towards this state the idea is to apply unwavering and passive attention to your body you simply give it your attention you simply give your breathing your attention and then wait that's it simple as that no need to contrive anything so what we do with this exercise is basically i i guide you through a series of regions of the body and you simply give your attention to that region of the body and then you don't try to change it don't so if for example if we're paying attention to the nose don't try to change the breathing as it passes through your nose don't try to change the shape of your nose or the length of your breath or anything like this also don't pay attention to any particular phenomena that arises doesn't matter either don't judge just simply give your attention to the nose because the process of giving your attention to it means that the body has the kind of nourishment from you mentally and energetically that it might require in order to change in order to develop and basically we just apply that principle to regions of the body and your breathing will naturally open up and move towards a form of abdominal breathing that is truly anchored and if you can get this kind of abdominal breathing then your mind will sink and your breath will sink and probably most importantly for the internal arts your chi will sink and if your cheese sinks then it will go to the end which is what so many of these arts are trying to do the more you can apply your attention to the breath and it unfolds in this way it evolves in the most efficient way possible the more you'll move out of fight or flight and you will calm and you will center and you'll know to the kind of placidity will come into your body so this is really what we're trying to do learning to apply the attention to our body in a very specific way so it can unfold in the right direction now sometimes um people engage with very strong qigong or naegong work especially stuff to do with fill in the dantian or putting yin and yangchi in the dantian and things like this which quite strong methods usually or breath retention that kind of stuff quite strong and what they tend to do often is they do these kind of exercises before they've correctly anchored the breath now if you do it before you've anchored the breath then the problem is that your focal point for your energy is too high so then the more energy you do build the more cheat you do get what you think is the dante end actually you hyper stress the body you hyper stimulate and you move it into fight or flight mode and this is a kind of a lot of the reasons for why many people start to develop problems from very strong qigong or yogic practices because they haven't yet got the quality of anchored breath they think they have but they haven't so consequently they're just firing putting more fuel on the on this sort of stress state you know firing themselves up so what i often do with people who have this kind of conditions is i just get them to learn how to anchor the breath before they do anything else before they do breath retention before they do any pranayama before they do any intense qigong before they do anything with an antenna let's just anchor the breath let's just learn how to get your attention into the body in the right way in the in the correct way so that your body can just unfold and evolve towards a state of being at ease so that then i can kind of overlay these powerful techniques on top and then your body will be fine and be able to process that energy and that you will go to the dan tien rather than firing up your your nervous system and stressing you out so this is what the exercise is gonna do it really is key i think all qigong tai chi negan meditation should start with this kind of practice before they engage in anything else they should do this kind of work just to make sure the breath the mind and the chi are in the right place before they do anything it's kind of like organizing everything to get it in the right spot before you start your practice and a lot of people have started the practice before they've done this organization which is why they can either sort of glass ceiling in their development or get problems later on down the road especially kind of stressed anxiety i see a lot of people do very strong internal work who don't have anchored breath and they always end up quite agitated and a bit cross and a bit domineering after a while because they're just doing all this energy work that's pushing themselves into this stress statement really if they just anchored the breath they'd be a lot more chilled and these kind of things wouldn't happen it'd be a lot better for their development last thing to say is a lot of people see this kind of work that i'm going to show you and they think it's for passionate as in the for passionate sort of meditation it's not it's it's it's an easy mistake to make because it looks quite similar because you're paying attention to to your breathing but just because you're paying attention to breathing doesn't mean it's for passionate because for passionate is not an exercise but passionate is a quality a principle of insight that arises as a result of the the work and essentially and for passionate to simplify it i mean it's a horrible oversimplification but you're becoming aware of the arising and falling of of something the kind of transitory nature of something that moves you towards the insight is that nothing is constant and nothing is independently existing separate from a process these are the kind of insights that arise from perpassion and a lot more i apologize to meditators for that description but it's you know it's a vague overview so the reason that this exercise is not for passionate um is very much because it doesn't have that aim it's not aiming to develop insight it's specifically aiming to enable your breathing to evolve in the right direction so that it could be anchored low and your chi will sink and your your mind will be rooted to the abdomen as its kind of focal point so so give it a go and see what happens and i would say that most people if you can apply your attention to the body correctly certainly after a few times practicing it you'll find that by the end of the practice your breathing is very long and slow and steady and low and you just feel comfortable and your mind is at ease and then you're like whoa i'm so relaxed now if there's a difference between how you feel after the exercise and before the exercise there's a sign there for you isn't it because if you feel more relaxed afterwards there's been a movement from one state to another now in actual fact you want to be living in the second state that state of relaxation the end of the exercise should be normal especially for an internal arts practitioner so if there is a change take note of that because it means you're probably living in a slightly fight or flight state and you don't want to do that especially not with internal work you've got to become comfortable you've got to become at ease so you want that post anchor in the breath exercise state to become normal for you to become normality now at the same time if you pay attention to your breathing and it becomes tight it becomes constricted it means you don't yet have good attention what you have is intention you might not realize it because that intention you're carrying into your body might be subconscious it might be emotional stress or chronic tension that's stored there and then when you look at your body everything gets really tight it means you're carrying with you lots of intention relax relax relax relax simply give attention simply listen to the body listen to the breathing as explained and if you purely give your attention without any carried subconscious intention if you purely give your attention to the body it will move into a state of comfort and ease that will be highly pleasant um so i can highly recommend it give it a try you know see what happens