I like the phrasing “Life is in the breath” which is the title of a podcast by Dr Ron Ehrlich, talking with breath therapist Dr Rosalba Courtney.
Apart from excellent information about breathing, what I really appreciated in the talk was rediscovering poetry from a breath expert.
Poetry has been my passion all my life, as a reader, writer and as a cultural facilitator. When the subject came up about breathing rate, Dr Courtney put it beautifully in perspective, that optimal breathing isn’t just about breathing at a particular breathing rate but about what you’re doing in your life and how you choose to relate to the world. Life, literally, is in the breath.
“Dr. Ehrlich: What’s the range of optimal breaths per minute?
Dr. Courtney: … If you‘re breathing and you’re at rest and calm, then the optimal speed of breathing for someone in their normal, everyday state might be somewhere between 9-15 breaths per minute. But if you’re breathing to put yourself into an ultra calm state and create optimal interaction between your breathing and your blood pressure mechanism and your heart rate and your autonomic nervous system, you probably breathe 6 breaths per minute.
Dr. Ehrlich: … So, ideally we should be breathing slower, depending on the stressors and the activity we‘re doing.
Dr. Courtney: Yes, exactly. Well, you know, the way I view it is, I think you just got to live your life, you know. If you always train at six breaths per minute then you might miss out on some fun things in life. And also it would be a bit artifical and forced. But it‘s really good to have times during the day where you go to that optimal state, so we need to go there. And people have always done things to take them there. For example, certain types of poetry, like the type of poetry in the oral tradition, the Illiad and the Odyssee and those poems that story tellers went around villages telling people and people would sit and listen for hours while the storyteller told this story in verse and it would be kind of rhythmic and he or she would have to breathe at around six breaths per minute and the listeners would entrain into that zone.
And also hymns and rosary prayers and certain types of music and children nursery rhymes tend to get people breathing at about that rhythm. So when you meditate, if you‘re focussing on your breath and really just relaxing and tuning in most people will tend to get to around six breaths per minute. It‘s a lovely place to renew, restore, and rebalance yourself, really.”