Breathing in San-Ti

[Anonymous]

Hi All,

When is it best to start doing reverse breathing in San-Ti, as one learns it ?
Right from the start ? Or should one first have a stable practice of all the rest of San-Ti (movements of Pi-CHuan, alignments, sinkings and raisings etc…) with normal Longevity Breathing before adding the Reverse Breathing component?

What was the classical way to do it ?

Erwan

[Anonymous]

From what I remember, use regular breathing in Hsing-I and Ba Gua until instructed to do otherwise.

Kumar teaches Reverse Breathing in Ba Gua, but that’s best done in person, regular belly breathing is plenty to start with. That will give you all the juice you need, in my experience reverse breathing isn’t much use unless you have the other nei gung components pretty well set up. it’s kind of icing on the cake.

Whereas dissolving, open & close, bend & stretch, alignments and other nei gung components are much more your meat and potatoes for any of the three main internal martial arts.
Jess O

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the advice. I’m going to focus first on getting all of the components of SanTi together, doing it with regular Longevity Breathing.

[Anonymous]

Just to continue the thread: I’ve just done 20 minutes of Santi with reverse breathing for the first time.
It’s really HARD !
I mean, it’s technicallly not that difficult to do, but after only three breaths the body seems to be saying : “That’s enough, give me a break, let me return to normal breathing !”

Apparently the more I do everything (alignments, sinking, breathing…),in a relaxed way, the longer I can perform Santi.
I gess that illustrates what Santi is all about : Simple stuff, but hard to sustain, especially if you’re not doing things perfectly right.
And that’s how it helps devellop your internal components real fast : by letting you feel in the most direct manner where you have something you have to correct/smoothe out/realign/…

[Author]

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