Visuals for a Breathing Body
There are two visuals over the past three years of my learning about the body that became invaluable the moment I saw them. A 3-D visual of how the diaphragm and ribcage move together during breathing, and the tensegrity toy used as a model to explain how our bodies our designed and the relationships between structures in our body during movement.
Understanding the shape and the movement of the diaphragm can be incredibly confusing. First, the diaphragm is a muscle, and when it’s relaxed, it resembles the shape of the dome top of a jellyfish. When we inhale, the dome lowers and flattens out, which means the circumference gets larger—that’s when our ribcage expands. When we exhale, the diaphragm returns to its original dome like shape, retracting in and floating up. The ribcage recoils back to it’s original size. If this doesn’t make sense, you’re not alone. I’m going to save my words and you should now pause and watch this video.
Isn’t that amazing?? I love that animation more than anything else I can find on YouTube because it depicts spinal flexion (rounding of the spine) on the inhale. A teacher of mine used to say that we’re “frontists” or we’re conditioned to favor the front of our bodies. That makes total sense as our eyes, our voices, our direction of walking exists forward. But it tends to translate into thinking about the breath as a forward movement. As you saw in the video, the ribcage doesn’t just expand forward, it expands backward too. I talk about and teach 360 breathing quite often to reflect this idea. You can watch a YouTube video where I guide you into it here. Another reason I love this animation is it shows the action of the inhale and the release of the exhale. The exhale is a recoil/release/response/effect of the inhale. The inhale is where the diaphragm actually contracts, and the exhale is where it relaxes. Of course we can control our breath to make the exhales forceful and the inhales passive, but generally speaking, when we’re not thinking about it, the exhales are passive. You can see in the animation the drifting/floating quality in the release of the exhale.
Try playing with this visual of your ribcage and see how it changes the way you breathe.
The tensegrity toy looks like this. The definition of tensegrity, which is actually a term stemming from architecture is:
The characteristic property of a stable three-dimensional structure consisting of
members under tension that are contiguous and members under compression that are not.
If you imagine playing with that toy, just moving it, pulling and pushing it in all different ways, you can imagine that the body is very much the same way. The bones are like the pieces of wood and our connective tissues such as muscles and tendons (any many others) are the elastic strings between the wood. What the model demonstrates is how movement of one piece inherently affects all the other pieces the model. They’re so interconnected through the forces of tension and compression because of their design that isolation of one area becomes difficult to imagine.
Now, put these two concepts together—the tensegrity structure of the human body and the fluctuating and fluid movement of breathing. Can you see how it might make sense to envision the entire body breathing? How the movement of the diaphragm and ribcage and therefore spine (and of course all the organs and motion of the blood and other fluids) influences the movement of our tissues everywhere else? While it sounds obvious to say that breathing affects the whole body, being able to envision it in a way that changes how we move our bodies is the key to inviting awareness, exploration, and change.
I recently finished reading Yoga Biomechanics—Stretching Redefined. It’s written by my teacher Jules Mitchell with whom I’m completing a comprehensive yoga, movement, and biomechanics training. I’ll leave you with two beautiful sentences from the book that, for me, perfectly encapsulate these ideas:
“Holding a yoga pose is anything but static. Rather, it is an equilibrium of the fluctuating forces within living, breathing bodies and tissues whose mechanical properties adjust over time, and with repetition.”
keep moving.