Design Breath, Bodywork & Space into Your Life
With such a “big word” headline including Life and Space and all, you have to hear the following first thing: Yes, you are able to design your life in order to increase those three things. By the end of today, you are able to feel a notable difference in these three areas. Let’s start with breath in a moment.
The same is not true, however, for say, musical skills. Imagine the title “Design Your Life for Musical Pieces by Mozart, Beethoven & Chopin.” By the end of any given day, you could at most play a melody as a beginner or infrequent player.
Designing Your Life describes the very doable process of stepping back, and applying a tried and tested design process to your life. It is a handrail or manual that guides you to a more desirable outcome.
Now how does designing Breath, Bodywork & Space into your Life work? Don’t you breathe and work your body anyway, and have space for a meal before lunch anyway? Fair enough, but let’s take a look.
Designing Breath
Breath is life. It is among the first things you do. I witnessed it three times after giving birth to my children. They left the comfort of my body, emerged and breathed. I closely listened for that inhale and exhale for several days after birth before I trusted its automatic rhythm. Actually, I still step on occasion next to their sleeping bodies to make sure they are alive. Yesterday, my toddler had not stirred for over 2 hours, so by leaning over the bed and hearing him breathing, I knew there was life.
However, most people breathe unconsciously, in response to activity — sitting, walking, a deep sigh in before a challenging work task begins, or a long moan out during sexual activity. Few people step away to think about this breathing activity, I’d say. It has never been taught like driving stick shift which then becomes automatic.
Yet some people, learn conscious breathing through various opportunities — from an attentive parent, in the context of sport like swimming or exhaling during racket sports, or as needed for pain management. In yoga practice, breath or pranayama is as essential as the physical poses or asanas. I’d even go as far as to say that it is impossible to find a yoga class in which there is no single mention of breathing. Why don’t you play “breath” word bingo in a yoga class tomorrow?
Now designing your breath is simply pulling this automatic activity to a more conscious level. Scientists say, we make at most 1000 conscious decisions per day, so there is good reason not every little thing needs our attention, but let’s pull out that breath file for the next 5 minutes.
While there are many design methods, let’s use the iconic 5-step design thinking flow for now.
1. Accept & Empathize with your breath.
You never paid attention to your breathe before? Okay, accept it. You gasp, snort, steam, and hustle through your day? Okay, accept it. It has worked more or less for now. It is part of who you are and you are worth loving and being respected — regardless of your breath, weight, income etc.
Take it a step further and feel it. You breathe most of the time unconsciously until now because your life is busy or you had no reason or motivation to reflect on it. Can you relate to that? It is humane. It is okay, too.
This first step of acceptance and empathy is crucial. It is the eye opening moment of intake of the status quo including the soft emotions.
2. Define the Goal & Purpose of your breath
This step must come second. It is based on what you accepted and empathized with. The goal definition is based on it.
A goal definition could be “Breathe with more awareness during meals, in between bites, and to enhance my enjoyment of food intake.”
“Breathe long breaths as I lay down to rest in my bed. Breathe into my whole body — in through the nose, down the throat, into the lungs, belly, and sending oxygenated blood into my finger tips and toes.” or lastly -
“Pay attention to my breath during this yoga class. While following the teachers instructions, I will prioritize breathing and its steady length.”
With a proper defined challenge and goal, the road is clear for step 3.
3. Ideate that Designed Breath
Ideation is the creative process where designers generate ideas on the topic through brainstorming, comparisons, and research informed input. They linger a bit longer in the “thinking and exploring” headspace before they narrow it down to “doing and trying”. Think of it as the Pinterest research stage, not the credit card quite yet.
As you can see, the designing process is about slowing down and spending time luxuriously on steps and inter steps. Once you’ve chosen your goal for your breath, what comes to mind? Write down notes with a pen on paper, or send a voice message to your friend with your thoughts. Maybe gesture your creative process.
Design Your Breath For Meals — Ask logical, yet also silly and far fetched questions. Do my lunch partners see me breathe? Is it polite to breathe loudly, yet not to smack with lips? One is supposed to chew each bite 20+ times, but how many breathes are recommended between bites?
Design Your Breath for Bed at Night — Get curious like a researcher. Ask 5 people how they breathe once they lay down. Understand how horizontal body position affects breathing. How do bears breathe during winter?
Design Your Breath for Exercise — How does breathing different by type of exercise — swimming, tennis, tai chi? Draw the flow of breath with lines, clouds, and momentum on a napkin.
And lastly, include the opposite of your goal breath. What would be the worst type of breath? With that, you will now have created a scale — from best possible to worst possible and this will help for evaluating next steps. At first some things seem unmeasurable, yet you got a whole lot closer to designing your breath.
4. Prototype Your Breath
Time to narrow down your long list of ideated and thought up ways of breathing. During prototyping, a simple experimental model of a proposed solution used to test or validate ideas, design assumptions is the focus.
This prototype is like a small scale model of a house to communicate the idea of the proposed house to the clients. It is good enough yet cheap for sure. Since it is costly in resources, if we designed one idea too soon in too much detail, the prototype is a smart sketch of what we may or may not invest in.
You could describe your prototype of a designed breath in a 20 second video. It’s like a video of a student project. Ready for feedback and further investment.
You could also draw a model of your breath like any illustrations in a psychology or medical text book. Label its parts, number its steps, and color what is important.
This is what always struck me. People would spend time and even procure professional help for a bathroom remodel because it would cost them 10,000 Euro to build. Yet they would not spend the same time and professional support for a life redesign.
What do you think the cost of a rushed, or unpremeditated life design would be? Wether you live with regrets or not, looking back, certain turns in life have their cost to them.
5. Test Your Breath Prototype
Enough thinking, planning, drawing, it is time to walk the talk and breathe the breath. Whatever is your preferred designed breath, try it out in person and observe the experience and its effect.
Maybe journal and take notes and photos. Pull someone else in to give a different perspective on it. “Hey, yoga teacher, I am trying to incorporate my breath more into my work. Do you mind looking out for me and telling me at the end of class if you’ve noticed something?”
All that you collect during this step is helpful for when you go through the same 5 steps again for fine tuning or to motivate you to stick with the new design to make it a habit.
Conclusion on Designing Your Breath
That’s that for the breath. I’ve started 12+ years ago to breathe more consciously during my 2–3 yoga classes per week. All the sudden, the breath became 5-count long. Inhale: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and exhale, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. It is hard to imagine my vinyasa flow practice without this rhythm.
Then 11 years ago, I learned to use my breath for giving birth. I had attended a regular prenatal birth class at a women’s hospital in Pittsburgh. No particular approach (like hypnobirthing), just a warm chatty nurse who took taboos away and had anecdotes and some exercises to follow. During the real deal experience, 23 hours of breathing through amounting waves of pain, my biggest learning was acceptance. Instead of whimpering for a “No, please not again.” I used breath and language for a long welcoming “Yes”, since after all I wanted the pain for a clear reason — for a baby to be born.
And lastly, transcendental meditation (TM) is another example of deliberately designed breath. For me, it’s David Lynch from Hollywood who popularized this meditation technique in my eyes. In this silent, mantra meditation, you sit 2x per day for 20 minutes, internally repeating a “meaningless” mantra. Interestingly, the mantra cues me to breathe a certain, remembered way and off I go into the meditative state.
