Breathing exercises sometimes just heighten anxiety (photo by pexels/gelatin)

Welcome to a guided journey through the 13 cranial nerves! (If you want to read the first of the series and watch the video, go HERE).

This month we continue exploring cranial nerve “0” (not shown above because it’s so recently discovered!) which carries information from the vomeronasal organ inside our nostrils to our brain. This information, even if it’s mostly vestigial, contributes to our sense of smell through the perception of pheromones. I love this mysterious organ because…you can’t even exercise it, improve it, or boss it around. You can pretty much only be curious and enjoy it! This state of curiosity about your body is, in my opinion, much more healing than any exercise you can do.

Besides, have you ever committed yourself to doing a certain kind of exercise, only to find yourself not following through on the commitment for one of these reasons:

1) You get bored with the repetition and sameness of the physical experience.

2) You don’t actually understand why the exercise is done the way that it is – you don’t understand the how of it, even if you understand the why. 

3) You don’t really want to do the exercise because it doesn’t feel good.

This problem has plagued me, even when it comes to one of the most pleasurable things in the world: breathing! For me, and many folks, the minute we bring our attention to our breathing, it gets tighter and more restricted and just makes us more anxious. Many breathing exercises which say they will calm you down involve holding your breath – which for me just increases anxiety. 

If you simply enjoy the sensation of air going out and coming in your nostrils, and you include that awareness in everything you do, your breathing and emotional state will improve over time, your exercise will feel better and be more fun, and it will benefit you more.

Is that too radical???

It’s really easy to use exercises and practices in a way that can actually make your anxiety and discomfort worse – by trying to change your actual experience, ignore it, or conquer it.

Furthermore, if you do a breathing exercise for 15 minutes a day and ignore your breathing (and your body) for the rest of the day, chances are it won’t have much effect. What’s really needed is to integrate what you learn about your body into your daily life in a way that is fun and interesting.

Walter Carrington, a long-time first-generation teacher of the Alexander Technique, was cherished for his ability to put people at ease in general, and specifically regarding breathing. Here is what he had to say about it. His words describe my own early attempts to work on breathing perfectly:

“When you talk to almost anybody about breathing, and they start giving special attention to their breathing, they start noticing their ribs or they start noticing their diaphragm, or they start noticing all sorts of different areas in the body. And if you pay attention to what’s happening in different parts of the body, the temptation to do something about it, particularly if you don’t like what’s happening, if you feel that you’re fixed or there’s too much movement, is pretty overwhelming. But if you simply content yourself with focusing on the nose and asking the question, “It the air flowing or isn’t it?” then at least you’re not going to interfere with your breathing and make it worse.”

And you can do this at any point during your day, while you are in activity.

Stay tuned for one more newsletter on the nostrils – and then we will move on to Cranial Nerve 1, the olfactory nerve! Just to tempt you to follow along, here is an illustration of all 12 (Nerve 0 is still being debated). 

If you’d like to have my expert yet open hearted guidance through the Cranial Nerve Sequencing process, you can go HERE to book a 15 minute consultation to find out if it’s what you need; and you can go HERE to find out more about the process and sign up for a series of 13 lessons for $1000.

Sumatran Tiger demonstrating Flehman response (sensing pheramones through Jacobson’s organ)

Welcome to a journey through the 12 cranial nerves! (If you want to read the first of the series and watch the video, go HERE).

This is my second of four newsletters on cranial nerve “0” and it’s recently re-discovered vomeronasal organ which sits inside your nostrils. This organ contributes, even if only subconsciously, to our sense of smell. Pheromones send messages about territory, sexual availability (sniff sniff) and which species you are. 

The health benefits of breathing through your nose are a hot topic at the moment and mentioned on many mainstream health websites. Three main benefits of breathing through your nose are:

1) Increases oxygen in the bloodstream by up to 20%

 2) Slows and deepens your breathing, enhancing a state of calm

3) Improves diaphragmatic motion and elasticity

 Perhaps, if you are in touch with your subconscious pheromone receptor, you are less likely to wander into the tiger’s territory! But even if we’ve evolved out of that kind of sensitivity, these three benefits link into many other aspects of health and immunity.

I am an embodiment educator, so I’m much more interested in your felt, personal experience of breathing, and less interested in giving you a set of exercises to do or overwhelming you with science. I give you a prompt to explore a specific place, a specific nerve or organ, and invite you to notice if you use excess tension in your exploration.  It’s part of my job to help you become aware of and let go of that tension so that you can get the full benefit of your exploration and make your life better, easier, and more attuned to the natural world.

Tension does not help us learn. Openness and ease does.

So don’t wait to read more! Right now, as you sit there, notice the sensation of the air inside your nostrils. Sniff. Rest attention there. Inquire and be curious – what if there was a layer to your sense of smell that was totally unconscious, mysterious, deeper than scent.

Let your face relax. Notice if your face, eyes, or mouth space are tensing as you breath in when you sniff, and let that tension go. See if you can let the roof of your mouth soften and open gently as the air comes in. Consider the skin of your upper lip, right under your nose – is it soft?

How does the rest of your body respond to this focus of attention?

The vomeronasal organ connects through its nerve to your limbic system – emotional regulation – and to subconscious likes and dislikes that your body responds to directly and easily. Attraction and repulsion. Unfortunately, many of us learn to ignore our body just to get through each crazy day. Our health is compromised when we disconnect from our bodies – and this nerve is a super easy way to return to yourself.

I’ve found I can tune into it anytime, anywhere. It helps me calm myself down during difficult conversations. It keeps my mind from wandering during meditation periods. I can do it when I’m walking or even as I’m writing this sentence. The softening of my mouth and face frees my neck and spine.

Don’t miss out on this simple pleasure! Try this first, before you go learning a bunch of exercises. Just integrate it into each day.

If you are motivated to learn more, Cranial nerve “0” and it’s organ, the vomeral or Jacobson’s organ, are still a bit of a mystery to science so it’s not easy to find accurate information. Lyall Watson’s entertaining book about it was not taken very seriously when it was first published, but more recent research is revealing that his speculations were connected to reality.

There really is an art to breathing and it’s relevant to our health and immune system now more than ever during this time of COVID. Just because western science hasn’t been able to explain certain phenomena doesn’t mean that there is no explanation, or that we can’t trust our bodies when they tell us something makes us feel good.

I feel moved to mention that India, the source of Yoga and much of what we know about breathing, is in great need of our help. I am not a yoga teacher, but my dear friend Monisha Raja is and she is hosting this amazing benefit to raise funds for COVID relief and to raise up Southeast Asian Yoga teachers who are often not given the exposure they deserve.

Monisha has been teaching Yoga for COVID survivors and survived COVID herself. She knows what she’s talking about! The schedule will soon be released, please register if you feel moved to help and to learn from these amazing teachers.

Would you like to have easy access to free breathing, calm yet alert awareness, readiness for movement, and ease in your posture? I invite you to come with me on a new educational journey that will last for one entire year. I’ll be making one video per month and writing newsletters once a week on related topics.

We will start at the front of the brain and work our way down into the brain stem. I’ll guide you in an exploration of each cranial nerve, giving you visual images to stimulate imagination and awareness, and explorations that connect each nerve with somatic experience, postural rebalancing, and ease of movement.

There are 13 cranial nerves, though what you’ll find in most anatomy books is 12. Today’s video and newsletter introduce the first, most recently re-discovered vomeronasal organ in humans and its cranial nerve, which is often called vestigial because it is so delicate in structure. If they had given it a number, we would have to re-write all the anatomy books! I like to call it Cranial Nerve 0 for fun, but officially it’s called “N.”

I’m going on this journey because I’m discovering so much from it about the the core of the Alexander Technique, which proposes that all human activity is more effectively coordinated when our head is balanced freely on our spine. One obvious reason that this might be the case is that so many of our guiding sense organs are in our head, and the more easily and freely it moves, the more detailed, accurate and subtle sense information we receive.

Each of these 13 nerves has a separate and distinct function in your coordination and expression. Some are purely sensory, others are purely motor, and some are a combination of both. They all tend to get glommed together in the blob we think of as our “head” – but I’ve found it amazing to spend time with each one separately as well, because our senses and movement can get blurred by the lack of distinction. A common habit I can give as an example is that if we are sighted, we tend to over-use our visual system and underutilize other organs.

When have you ever heard anyone complain about “nose strain?”

The vomeronasal organ is probably in constant dialogue with your subconscious mind. Its nature is to process pheromones – the chemical signals related to sexual arousal and other attraction or avoidance behaviors in animals. There is much debate about whether humans process and respond to these chemical molecules – but my interest is just in the fact that we have this organ, and a nerve that still carries some information from the organ to our brain. Vestigial or not, it’s still a part of us.

It’s in cartilaginous tissue of the nose, rather than the bony sinus cavities between your eyes. If you lead the movement of your head from this mysterious organ, it’s lower down and further out in front of your body. I think of it is more mobile and a bit more mischievous. When I imagine it having a mind and interest of its own, I get curious about the air around me, the spaces just over my shoulder. I stop being so oriented towards the front and become aware of what’s to my sides and around behind me.

Here is an image that shows where the organ is, in relationship to the olfactory cells higher up between your eyes in your sinuses.

EXPLORATION:

Rest your sensory awareness on this more forward part of your nose as you breath in, and out.

– Does it slow your breathing down, or speed it up?
– Do you feel breath motion in other parts of your torso as well as your nose and sinuses?
– Does it affect the length of your exhale at all?
– Your inhale?
– What is it like to move your head from “interest in chemicals” at this place, instead of visual interest or sound? Is the balance of your head different in any way?

This is part of what I’ll be exploring in my weekly Mobile Body Alignment classes. Come and explore with us! HERE is a link to more information.