Hey friends,

When people ask me how to do Hormesis Breathing, they usually mean the deep breaths and the holds. That's the exciting part, I get it. But when I sit down to design a session, that part gets maybe a third of my attention. The rest goes into how I bring you in, and how I bring you out.

I want to walk you through how I think about that, because once you see the shape, you don't need my voice anymore. You can build your own.

Getting in

I never start with breathing. I start with sitting.

Sit upright, and just feel how gravity pulls on you. Every joint, the shoulders, the jaw, the weight going down into the chair. Let whatever tension you can find melt a little into the surface under you. This is the moment to fidget. Shift, adjust, fix the cushion. And then make a decision: this is the position. From here on, whatever comes up, you stay and accept it.

That decision does more than it looks like. Every little adjustment during a session is a small trip out of your body and back into your head. Deciding once closes that door. And some things you can't adjust away anyway. A tight hip, noise from the kitchen, a restless mood. Those come along for the ride, and practicing with them is part of the practice.

Then I watch the breath without changing it. Hands on the belly, feel it rise and fall. Notice the little pauses between an inhale and the exhale, and between the exhale and the next inhale. Most people have never paid attention to those pauses in their life, and there's a lot in there.

This is your baseline. If you don't know how you felt when you sat down, you won't know what changed when you stand up. And a change you can't feel is a change you won't trust, and won't come back for.

Only now do I start taking control, and very gently. Stretch the inhale a bit. Linger in the pause. Let the exhale out slowly, and sit in the pause after it until the urge to breathe shows up. Then watch that urge. How does it build? Where do you feel it? Slowing a thing down gives you more time to notice it, and here you also get to meet the air hunger in its mildest form, long before you meet it in a two-minute hold. It stops being a stranger.

From there the breath gets bigger, in stages. First only the lower belly, to all sides, including the lower back. Then the ribs, and the picture I use is two doors opening outwards, not a chest lifting up. Then up to the collarbones. And only at the very top may the throat join in. You'll hear when it happens; the inhale suddenly sounds dramatic. A lot of people start every strong inhale in the throat, and that's a problem, because a tight throat stops the diaphragm from dropping fully. Belly first, throat last.

I go slow enough that I can follow the whole route of the breath in my mind, bottom to top. Because once the breathing speeds up later, the body will do whatever it rehearsed. Rehearse it slow and full, and fast will be full too. Start fast, and it stays sloppy for the rest of the session.

There's one more reason I take my time here. Hormesis Breathing is a deliberate stress. A short dose of stress that you recover from and adapt to, that's the whole idea behind the name. But a dose only registers when it lands on a calm system. If you sit down wound up from your day and go straight into thirty hard breaths, you're stacking stress on stress. The body can't tell the signal from the noise. The settling in is what makes the breathing a clean signal.

The work

The middle part is the part everyone already knows. Full breaths, let go with a sigh, a long hold after the exhale, a shorter hold on full lungs with a gentle squeeze toward the navel, and then back into breathing. A few rounds of that.

The one design choice I'd point out is that I always offer intensity rather than prescribe it. Follow up sooner with the next breath if you want more. Pop the exhale through the lips. Switch to mouth inhales. Or don't, and stay with the nose. Picking your own dose for the day is how you match the intensity with your current state and in what direction you want to move to.

Getting out

This is the part most people skip, and the part I would protect over everything else.

After the last hold, I don't open my eyes. First the breath goes subtle. Inhale as lightly and slowly as I can, and stretch the exhale as long as it goes, without ever letting it tip into a gasp. A long soft exhale is one of the few direct handles you have on the vagus nerve, the nerve that runs the rest and recover side of your nervous system. A few minutes of that and the whole system shifts gear.

Then awareness. I find a point about two fingers below the navel. In the Chinese traditions I come from it's called the dantian, but you don't need the name, just the spot. I let attention settle there until it feels full, and then let it grow, slowly, until I feel the whole body at once, head to toe, all in one picture. After a few rounds of holds this is surprisingly easy. The body is warm, buzzing, loud. It's hard to not feel it. At some point it tips over into something that feels like sitting inside a warm bath. Calm, but not sedated. Awake, but not racing.

That state is the point of the session. The breathing produced the raw energy. The stillness decides what shape it takes.

Here's why I'm so stubborn about this part. In any kind of training, the adaptation happens in the recovery, not during the effort. Cut the recovery and you've had a workout, but you haven't adapted to anything. And there's a second thing, more psychological. We don't remember an experience as an average of all its moments. We remember the most intense point and how it ended. Daniel Kahneman showed this decades ago, the peak-end rule. Your most intense point is always the last hold. What you pair it with is the ending. End in that warm bath and the practice gets filed in your memory as something you want to go back to. This is also a reason why I like to couple Hormesis breathing with deep mindfulness topics to cultivate inner growth.

Then I bring movement back. Fingers, toes, a stretch. And before I get up, I take a moment to ask what came up. Sometimes it's gratitude, sometimes a wave of warmth for someone, sometimes nothing in particular. Writing it down or simply naming it in my mind is what turns a state into something I recognize. Once you can recognize a state, you can find your way back to it. That's when a session stops being something you did and becomes something you can do.

The shape, in one line

Settle, read the breath, slow it, grow it. Do the work. Then land, subtle breathing, whole-body awareness, movement, a moment of reflection. Something like five minutes in, ten minutes of work, five or more minutes out.

If you're short on time, shorten the middle, not the ends. That's the one rule I'd keep if you forget everything else in this email.

And if you'd rather be guided through the whole arc than build it yourself, I recorded exactly this, start to finish, about 26 minutes. It's here:

Breathe well,
Kitaro

P.S. If one guided session leaves you wanting more of that- more live guided sessions, someone looking at your practice and giving you direct feedback, and courses that build this up step by step- that's what Breath Rituals is: my academy and community on Skool. The Breath Rituals membership price will go up at 200 active members (we're at 185 now). So lock in your lower price now and keep it as long as you're a member. Have a look here​

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