Breathing

Breath-holding

When I was about six years' old, I had a nose bleed caused by blowing my nose. In an attempt to clear my blocked nose, I burst a blood vessel.

Mam said that, in future, when I had a blocked nose, instead of blowing my nose, I should try holding my breath.

This did not sound like good advice, but, in fact, it worked like a dream.

Soon, I was practicing holding my breath as long as I could. When I started swimming lessons, I could soon swim under water across the pool, and, not long afterwards, the length of the pool.

However, to clear the nose, a very long breath-hold was not necessary.  Hold for as long as comfortable. If this does not fully clear the nose, why, simply, repeat the exercise. (Well, the longer you hold, the clearer your nose and related channels, but repeats of comfortable holds is better than "bursting a blood vessel" with a great effort).

In the swimming pool, I took a deep breath and held it. However, in general, the more therapeutic method is to breath out and then hold.

Beside clearing your nose, this can clear the passages around your eyes, ears and all sinuses. While holding, in order to clear a particular channel, it helps to focus your mind on the area targeted.

I did not realise, of course, that this exercise, if practiced often enough, can  contribute to general good health. Your nose does not need to be completely blocked. Breath-holding relieves congestion, whether severe or mild.

Why Me?

Q: Why Me? Why did I have a stuffy nose and chronic Catarrh, and not my brother's, Roger and Jerry?

A: Because I slept in the middle!

When I was about 3, I was moved out of my cosy cot to share a big double bed with my two brothers. I was given the middle position.

How does the one in the middle control his temperature in bed? He can't always throw off the cover, or create more space for himself, so he gets into the habit of panting like a dog: rapid, mouth-breathing.

Rapid mouth-breathing may cool you down, but it sends too much air to the lungs and this frustrates the escape of carbon dioxide from the blood; so, the auto-immune system blocks the nose to slow down the amount of air entering the lungs, to let carbon dioxide escape (I have read). Mouth-breathing is not the right way to breath. The nose and sinuses get chronically blocked!

So, the one in the middle is snotty and snuffy.

Wim Hof, a Dutch man, born in 1950, known as "the Ice Man," and his precursors going back 3,000 years, yogis of Tibet and the Himalayas, claim (in multiple Web sites) that exercises in rapid, deep, breathing (Wim Hof method, or Pranayama) can heat up the body, enabling us to roll naked in the snow, swim in iced lakes, climb icy mountains in our shorts and carry out super-human tasks. Recent research on these methods have found (so far) that this hyperventilation does not cause an increase in body temperature, or increase the amount of oxygen in the blood, but, instead, causes an increase in carbon dioxide (for the elevated air pressure in the lungs prevents the carbon dioxide from escaping, causing the dark blood to re-circulate) and the release of  adrenaline into the blood, so that pain and cold are tolerated and the body moves into alarm mode. So, these exercises can be useful if we are  about to swim in icy pools or go into battle, but not so good for ordinary living.

 

Silent Breathing

We three boys liked playing Hide and Seek. There were two games, one where an object was hidden, and the other where you hid yourself.

Well, now in my old age, I realise that the fun was in the finding of the hidden object or person. You should not hide to escape detection, but hide to be found! Back then, I misinterpreted the objective. When I hid, I contrived to hide in such a way that I, or my object, could never be found.

Actually, there was a second motive. From the very beginning of my life, which started during the Second World War, my father would, at dinner-time, read out of the newspapers accounts of war events and the exploits of Churchill, Hitler and Stalin; how young persons hid from the Gestapo; how Stalin wanted to conquer the world for communism; how Churchill was talking about taking back the ports (which I wrongly interpreted as the entire cities of Dublin, Cork and more, rather than just berths for his fleet). 

In the event of an invasion of Ireland, I needed, perhaps, to be able to hide myself really effectively.

One time I decided to hide under the stairs. (The whole house except Miss Comerford's room was the field of action). The latch on the door of this tiny room could only be opened from the outside, so a clue to this hiding place was the door being on the latch. To remove this clue, I gently pulled the door after me so that the latch engaged.

Among other things, under-the-stairs was a cloak room. Hanging from the risers of the stairs, there was, first, a line of long coats; behind this there was a line of short coats, and, getting down on your knees, you could access the assortment of wellington-boots languishing under the lowest stairs.

Well, I went in behind the lot; carefully re-arranging the long coats, and then the short coats, behind me. I curled up into a ball, and pressed myself under the lowest-possible stair, hiding carefully behind the collection of wellingtons.

Now, I was a very noisy breather, and had to contrive to eliminate that massive clue. Carefully I slowed down my breath and made it silent. As long as I hid there, I focused completely on this task, silently breathing in and silently breathing out. I was totally hidden and totally silent in that stuffy, gassy place, (gassy because the gas meter was housed there in front of the coats).

If I remember properly, my brother, Roger, was "on," and he quickly found Jerry. Then, my two brothers searched the whole house from top to bottom and found me not. Yes, they did look under the stairs, not expectantly due to the latched door, but saw nothing out of place (and heard nothing).

Finding nothing, they simply forsook the search and went out to play, just as if there never was a third brother, and I, forsaken, languished in that tiny, locked, stuffy, gas-smelling place, until eventually released by my mother.

It has now been discovered (see the writings of Patrick McGeown, author of "The Oxygen Advantage," and others on line) that silent and slow nose-breathing is very therapeutic. Had I kept it up. I might have avoided much Migraine and Hay-fever and runny noses, and been more healthy and energetic throughout my life!

Like breath-holding, silent breathing helps to keep the nose and sinuses clear, as well as optimising the use of oxygen, and the formation and uptake of another essential and neglected gas: Nitric Oxide.

Ozone

My father thought it good training to bring his children up to the park or out to the seaside, and, there, to practice taking in big breaths of ozone-rich air. (Yes, the ozone theory of fresh air was popular in the war years). 

When following his instructions, we drew in deep breaths and raised our shoulders up to accommodate the air. I learned in the choir that this was actually wrong: what you should do is inflate your tummy, and not your chest.

Choir Boys

When I was 4, my big brother Roger made his Holy Communion and joined St Peter's Church Choir. Well, he truly was a beautiful singer. In fact, he was one of the top boys in the choir, so he was stolen (along with his choir-mate, Bobby Higgs) by the Palestrina Choir in the Pro-cathedral. He still came to Phibsborough choir when not required by the Pro-cathedral. ("Phibsborough" is also called "Phibsboro," so good they named it twice, as the Phib-Fest notice now declares).

Father Hastings, who organised Saint Peter's choir, also ran an operetta in Saint Peter's Hall, and Roger was in this. I looked forward very much to seeing him in the show, but the show was staged in the middle of winter, and I was unable to attend because I had a cold. I asked Roger to sing some song from the show for me, but he would not. As he cavorted around, he tended to sing an old nursery rhyme to himself:

"Up the ladder and down the wall,

A penny loaf will serve us all."

I asked him if that was from the show, but he said: "Don't be stupid."

By the time I was 7 and ready to join the choir, Father Hastings had died, and the task of running the choir was passed onto Father Vincent Allen. While he knew a lot about church music and liturgy, he did not consider himself as musically-skilled as Father Hastings, so he hired Paddy Somerville to run the choir. Unlike Father Hastings, Paddy did not give the choirboys a solo singing-test. However, what I did not know is that, when standing in front of 40 boys, Paddy could actually discern each individual voice, particularly if they were out of harmony..

Diaphragm Breathing

In the choir, we were taught to breath into the tummy. Well the air actually goes into the lungs. It is the pressing down of the diaphragm that causes the tummy to feel like it is inflating. This gives us a greater breath and greater control over our breath. 

Hong Kong Banking

In the choir, we also did exercises to improve our voices, like singing Ah-Ah-Ah up and down the scale, and singing rhymes like:

Honga Konga Bankinga, Ching A chonga

This exercise strengthened the palate muscles to eliminate unwanted nasal sounds. 

Humming

We did humming exercises to help project the voice. When humming, we were not to hum in the throat, but fell our lips vibrating as we hummed.

Scientists now say that humming is a way of putting Nitric Oxide into our blood, with multiple health benefits.

Chewing and Mewing

When I went to Big Boys school (at 8) I soon found that the lash of the teacher's bamboo cane, so dramatised by the kids, was nothing compared to the real pain of a headache or a tooth-ache. (Well, my teachers never lived up to the severity promised by my big brother).

The sting of the cane was external, whereas the headache or tooth-ache was inside in your very soul!

Toothache at 8 or 9? Yes, indeed. One day my mother took me in desperation around Phibsborough, visiting one dentist after another, all refusing to treat me until my gumboil would first go down. Eventually she found me a dentist, Mrs Finucane on the Cabra Road, who was prepared to remove the offending tooth under gas.

But again, why Me? Why not the others?

It comes down to one of the consequences of being a dawny child.

When I was about four months old, the family went on Holiday down the country. I began to vomit, and kept vomiting continuously for about four months. The doctors could not say why, but advised that I be fed plenty of boiled water until the vomiting stopped.

My father blamed the Limerick air or water for my ailment, but, in retrospect, I have read that "cyclical vomiting" is a form of infant Migraine, and was most probably brought on as Travelling Sickness during the motor journey to Limerick.

Well from then, I was a weak, sickly thing, and was probably fed more softly than my big brothers. While they were raised on robust carrots and potatoes, I was, no doubt, lavishly treated to "goody," a mash of rusk made with refined wheat and sugar, two toxins deadly to fresh young teeth. As well as that, fluorine, with its protective powers, had not yet been added to drinking water. (It was added to drinking water in Ireland from 1964).

Meanwhile, the carrots and potatoes were mashed in butter, which added a basket of nutrients, including vitamin D and calcium

So. I, on my rusk diet, did not not need to chew very much. But chewing is necessary to the firming of the jaw muscles and the expansion of the jaw bones to accommodate the growing collection of teeth.

Mrs Finucane removed a molar tooth on one side of my jaw, and another dentist removed the corresponding tooth on the other side. Orthodontics was not a term used in Ireland in those days, but the removal of those two teeth ended the crowding of the jaw and the remaining lower teeth remain intact and healthy to this day. The toothache was probably basically caused by the crowding of those new teeth trying to make space for themselves.

Dr Tony Mew (on the Web) today discourages Orthodontics (making space for and straightening teeth), suggesting, instead, that children, and people of all ages, chew and mew to keep their jaw and tongue muscles healthy, and, by these exercises, expand the jaw-bones to accommodate all the natural teeth.

Since we eat a lot of soft foods and do not eat enough tough, chewy stuff, we should practice moving our jaws as if chewing (but not clench our teeth) and/ or "tongue-chew" chewing gum (i.e. put the chewing gum on top of our tongue and chew it by pressing it, with the tongue, against the upper palate).

When I was a young child, there was an ad by the Health Board in the papers showing a drawing of a human head with air and food channels, and a drip from the back of the nose down into the body. I asked my mother what this meant, and she explained that the Health Board was warning that germs could be taken in through the nose and that, by swallowing our saliva, they can be taken into our bodies and infect us. It seemed to be a warning against swallowing. In fact swallowing is very necessary, and Dr Mew recommends "Mewing" as an important tongue-strengthening exercise, inter alia to prevent or cure sleep apnea.

Mewing

With lips closed, the resting position of the tongue should be against the upper palate, tip of tongue behind the upper teeth. To mew, you hold the tongue firmly against the upper palate while you swallow three times. This will strengthen the tongue and cure sleep apnea.

Too dry to swallow? Take a sip of water first.

Mew and chew several times a day to strengthen the palate and tongue muscles, improve your breathing and cure sleep apnea.

(The other natural remedies for Sleep Apnea, of course, include not eating or drinking in the evening, e.g., after 8 p.m., reducing alcohol intake to very modest amounts, and sleeping on one's side instead of back).