Here is an article I had out in Martial Arts Illustrated last month - hope you enjoy. My section - The Mental Edge is available in your monthly edition where I tackle matters of mind and body

Don’t hold your Breath

This article was inspired by a recent excursion I took into the world of water, a course in scuba diving to be precise.
The experience was a real awakening to my sense of composure as from the outset it was clear that mental focus was going to be an integral part of the process.
Scuba is essentially a process of respiratory control and lends many parallels to meditation as my instructor, Osman, duly pointed out in our initial briefing. Breathing, I was informed, is the key to how we maintain mental focus - “if we breathe too fast anxiety can be triggered and this can lead to a panicked diver. Unfortunately at depths of 20 meters and over this not option so slow composed breathing is your life line”
As the week went by, deeper; darker and frankly colder dives made this task to maintain breathing control a real challenge. Many divers have lost their lives through lack of mental composure.
But the lesson didn’t end there. In scuba we also have another very important task to tend to and that is buoyancy. Whether we sink or float in water is ultimately determined by how much water we displace and as we fill and empty our lungs water volumes increase and decease accordingly while our actual body mass remains constant. This ordinarily would cause us to float up and down haphazardly in the ocean as we inhale and exhale in a rather ungraceful manner lest we learn to breathe in a slow and steady pace. This is a far more difficult task than it sounds and once more requires a very intimate relationship between body and mind to achieve.
At the risk of this descending into a scuba lesson I will now steer your attention into more familiar waters. Martial arts is a philosophy of body and mind though it is all too often orphaned out as one or the other. The marriage of the two is often ordained through breathing yet physical practice and mental awareness of breathing can seem like rubbing your tummy and patting your head simultaneously to many of us. We are all guilty of this from time to time. Yes we exhale when we kick and deep breathe when tired and so forth but how relevant is breathing to your art?
Maybe I’m just projecting or at least I thought I was until recently on an internet post on MAI’s forum a very capable martial artist who has been studying in Japan posted a video of himself gracefully gaining 4th position in a kata competition. He was informed by the judges that his lacking breathing technique was where he lost points. A great performance, no doubt, but if we seek perfection we must look deeper into the depths of our practice.
I am an advocate of meditation and have been for some time as part of my lucid dreaming practice so I have outlined a couple of principles and practices here for you to prompt some enhanced respiratory welfare in your training.
This first practice helps build better respiratory muscles. In the West we all too often assume that filling our rib cage purports to be a good breath when in fact it is our lower abdomen (tummy) we should aim to fill. Try sitting comfortably cross legged and breathe in deeply and slowly for up to 8 seconds and the same again out emptying your lungs completely before repeating. Gently place your hands on your abdomen and feel them push back and forth, parallel to the ground. Try closing your eyes and watch your breathing. If other thoughts enter your mind simply detach from them. Do not wrestle with them or judge them but instead allow your mind to watch your breathing again. Try this for two minutes, five minutes and so forth - now you are meditating.
Regular practice will yield a more effective oxygen delivery system to your circulatory system. Furthermore it acts to untangle the mind from all its anxieties and unhealthy thinking. By tasking the mind with a single duty like watching your breathing it detaches the mind from meaningless mental chatter and allows it to settle. In more advanced practice we can use this method to allow the mind to expand.
Taking this a step further would be the notion of watching your breathing while jogging, lifting weights or more complex motions as in Tai Chi. This is a practice that yields healthy body and mind and as a retired athlete myself I can say that it is a very rewarding direction to take your training after years of competition. My good friend Stan Diamond Prescot helped me illustrate this article with a demonstration of a Thai breathing method known as Swallowing the Sun. Stan teaches traditional MAE-MAI TIGER MUAY THAI.
On closing I would like to take a moment here to thank the team at MAI for their continued support of the holistic approach to martial arts and the readers of this section for their attention.