03/01/2021
Wailua Falls in Maui is a sacred place of water, earth, fire and air. Places like these can teach us to harmonise the four elements using our breath as our guide. But what is the perfect breath? As I explain in the most recent guided meditation on the podcast, it is the breath that is universally arrived at by any careful student of spiritual or physical health. For example, people reciting a Buddhist mantra, the Latin version of the rosary, and the Catholic prayer cycle of the Ave Maria all breathe between five and six breaths per minute during their prayer or mantra or meditation. And the body loves this length: researchers in one of these experiments connected sensors to measure the subject’s blood flow, heart rate, and nervous system activity. Whenever the chanters followed this slow breathing pattern and were in this zone of about 5.5 breaths per minute, blood flow to the brain increased and the functions of heart, circulation, and nervous system reached a state of peak efficiency and harmony. In other words, the systems in the body entered a state of coherence right around this number of about 5.5 second inhales and 5.5 second exhales, which also works out to be about 5.5 breaths per minute. This same phenomenon has been observed across cultures and time periods. Whether it is Buddhist monks, yogis or, Jainist chanting, each of these takes 5 or 6 seconds to vocalize, followed by a five to six second inhale. In the Hindu tradition, "khechari" hand and tongue mudras which are purported to help bolster physical health and promote spiritual development, the practitioner places their tongue and hands in specified positions and take deep, you guessed it, slow and even breaths which each take between 5.5 and 6 seconds. This phenomenon has been observed as well in Hawaiian, Native American, Japanese, African, and Taoist cultures. They all arrived at the roughly the same techniques, each requiring the same breathing patterns.
