Wu Wei: As Applied to Breathing

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned from gung fu (and subsequently tai chi and yoga) is how to breathe effectively. I’ve learned that, for an effective inhalation, I must use my abdominal and intercostal muscles in sequence to expand the abdomen and the chest while maintaining a steady, even flow of air – like sipping tea as one of my teachers put it. And to exhale, the sequence is simply reversed, slowly and steadily collapsing first the chest and then the abdomen. This way, every breath is both effective and efficient.

Over the past year or so, a major focus of my gung fu practice has been to coordinate my breathing with my movements. I started out with the simple view that one exhales when exerting force. The first challenge to this view came during tai chi – I was simply told to breathe naturally and not worry about holding to one inhalation / exhalation per move. And yoga added to my confusion… suddenly I was learning to inhale while exerting force. This seemed to immensely benefit my flexibility and looseness. And, when I thought about it, it made sense too… one could inhale to expand and exhale to contract. So, now I thought there were two ‘right’ ways to breathe. I figured, to focus on power, which is hard, exhale when exerting force and to focus on flexibility, which is soft, inhale while expanding or exerting. But then I began to wonder how I might find both hard and soft within each move. If, say Hung Gar, as a style, combined both hard and soft, I reasoned that at some level, each technique had to have some components of both hard and soft as well. Indeed, when I attended a tai chi seminar in Salt Lake a few months ago, the teacher said as much and encouraged participants to work on finding various combinations of breath and action that flowed together. Then it began to dawn on me that there wasn’t going to be one or two simple correlations between breath and movement. For instance, how I breathe while using an overhead tigerclaw block would depend on how hard or soft I want the contact to be, how I want to bridge with the incoming strike. While this helped me understand the overall concept, it left me with one huge question. How exactly do I apply this in practice? And then, a few weeks ago, I started learning Wing Chun. While I’ve barely gotten started with the style, I nonetheless noticed immediately the emphasis on breathing naturally. 

This morning, as I was practicing my tai chi, I was focused on keeping my movements slow and smooth and forgot about my breathing. Part way through the form I noticed that I was breathing slow, deep and steady but not holding to any set pattern such as one breath per movement. Whatever I was doing, seemed to help me move better but I still don’t understand exactly what I was doing. So, now I have to try and repeat this in order to figure it out a bit better. But such is the way of gung fu I guess… I’ve found next question and once I have some sort of handle on this, I’ll have more questions still. It’s never going to get boring.