Box Breathing (Four-Sided Breathing) (Patreon)

• If you’re new to LMA, start with our table of contents

Shaping our breath

Unlike "Internal Awareness," which I only do once or twice with LMA practitioners, box breathing is something I encourage practitioners to do every time they come to the Learning Lab. It's not about awareness but setting an audible rhythm—like a count in to a musical piece. Training is physical music. You, as the practitioner, attune to its melody.

Since we are engaging with the body and physical movement, the language of LMA tries to use physical descriptions, sensations (like sounds), or comparisons as much as possible.

Since you can't watch yourself move, nor is self-monitoring even helpful, you rely on sensation, perception or imagination, and experience to drive movement. The same sensors that tell you that you are touching a table are the same ones that tell you how you are moving your arm. The tissues of your body tell you what you are touching or how you are moving.

Giving mechanical instruction is not always helpful. What's more relevant and valuable is describing a shape, an external object, or a physical task rather than describing yourself.

Box breathing is a type of four-sided breathing. A box has a shape and sides. Our breath also has a shape. By shaping our breath, we regulate ourselves and make ourselves shapeable.

Learning is often referred to as shaping. In physical movement, that's a literal truth. Physical movements are just shapes. Shaping yourself means physical learning. Tension and an environment of tension prevent learning. Since movements are just shapes, what actually needs to be learned are shapes, and the learning language should describe shapes. Shapes and interacting with shapes make sense, whereas words are abstract and meaningless to the body. Try explaining the physical movement of a squat to someone who has never seen that exercise. Those words will mean nothing. Telling them to sit on an imaginary chair is meaningful.

Behaviors can be modeled. Give them something to model or a mental model to shape physical behavior. Show them a squat, have them imagine a chair, or have them sit on a bench. Describe an experience, like seeing a child squatting and playing with toys. Give them substance to engage with rather than abstract words. The physical description of a squat doesn't live in the world. Give them something that exists in the world—something they can grasp.

In box breathing, each side is four seconds long. Four sides, four seconds. You inhale for four, hold for four, exhale for four, and hold for four. Each side of a box is smooth. A smooth object has a physical sensation, look, and sound. You're replicating that smooth sensation and sound with your inhales, exhales, and pauses. You don't want struggle. You want ease. Ease is smooth.

If four sides for four seconds require too much thought or deliberate counting, I tell practitioners to inhale and exhale slowly, with pauses in between. What's important is that they slow down and remain consistent. Precision doesn't matter; they simply need to be in the ballpark.

As discussed in "An Anti-colonial Perspective on De-escalation," the person who needs to be de-escalated is yourself. Once we are at ease, we can better learn, adapt, and avoid injury (psychological and physical).

Box breathing is meant to take command over the automatic breathing function. Once we regulate an automatic function, we regulate ourselves.

We can breathe without thinking, but it's often irregular and disjointed. Imagine that happening to our heartbeat.

We're slowing our breath, slowing ourselves, and forming a consistent and smooth breathing rhythm (which is both feel and sound). We're also warming up and stretching our lungs, body tissues, and internal systems.

We're breathing into areas of our body that carry tension, then releasing it away. We want a soft body and a supple mind, which starts with releasing tension. A soft body is malleable. A malleable body can learn and avoid injury.

Scan your body for tension. Inhale through the nose and breathe into an area with tension. Pause and massage that tension with air. Exhale through pursed lips (like blowing out a candle) and release the tension away (blowing the tension out and away from your body). Pause to feel the tension shrink away and not come back. Repeat.

Commanding your breath sometimes means creating valves to control airflow. Your nose is a natural valve for inhales. Your mouth can literally become a valve for exhales.

Deep breathing makes a sound. It's not purely a sensation of the nose, mouth, throat, and lungs; it's also auditory.

Throughout the day, I breathe into tension and breathe it away. You don't have to stick to box breathing to do this. Box breathing is the scaffolding to develop breath control and tension release. I tend to pause between inhales and exhales when I'm blowing out tension, but not for four seconds, but as needed. I also don't repeat the four-sided cycles for as long as I do with box breathing since this is only for maintenance. It's one to three cycles (boxes), but I blow out hard since I'm only doing a few.

Through breathing exercises and thinking about my breath, I'm highly attuned to my breathing (but also to others). When I notice myself holding my breath, I exhale and get myself back into a consistent and smooth rhythm. If I'm not breathing, I inhale and start again. You'd be surprised how often you are not breathing or breathing rapidly throughout the day. If you notice rapid breathing, it's probably because you were unconsciously holding your breath prior to it. For instance, running up a flight of stairs is strenuous enough, but people tend to hold their breath as they strain, so part of that climb was while holding your breath. Your body needs to recover that lost oxygen through rapid breathing.

Starting a gym routine often means unconsciously holding your breath while straining, which increases exertion and causes feelings of dizziness and nausea. Why would you want to return? The gym is already hard. It's a lot harder when you're holding your breath the whole time you are there. It's important to note that this is unconscious and automatic. Who would deliberately choose to withhold oxygen while doing something already difficult? Since no one consciously decides to do this, telling them not to do it won't change anything. This is the problem with direct instruction; it applies conscious instruction to unconscious behaviors, causing self-consciousness and a breakdown in the flow of information and learning.

Change is radical, which requires a radical approach. The status quo and colonial (direct) instruction maintain or regress the status quo. Who would need therapy and medication if telling people to calm down worked? People often join gyms for mental health reasons because being told to calm down doesn't work. However, the gym often increases tension and worsens anxiety. Coloniality prescribes you disease for the malady.

Having a supple body doesn't mean releasing tension only once but constantly releasing it away whenever you feel it arise and take hold. You're at your best when you're breathing and at ease. You're most alive when you are breathing.

Practitioners don't do box breathing for long. It's meant to establish an initial tempo for breathing and release. The rest of training is the song.

– Sam