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To wrap up this short series on the function of breathing, it would be great to hear from you.  A piece of poetry, a quote, a discovery about your diaphragm, your exhale.

 

Here are two free on-line Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement lessons that Lynette Reid makes available on her site.  You will need some time, but will find them well worth the exploration.

 

 

 

Perhaps you are from another field of exploration and would like to offer something.  We are listening.

 

 

Okay so, there is a bit more here than the rib basket, but it truly does encase and serve as a major aspect of the exhalation engine. Once the exhale occurs, the lungs, not having less air than the atmosphere, rush to expand. Without the intercostal muscles of the ribs contracting and creating shape changes, not much will happen.

 

Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais, the father of somatics, said that if he could only improve one function, it would be the action of breathing.  Perhaps from this series you are beginning to appreciate why.  At Integrative Learning Center, in Integral Human Gait theory (as taught in our Gait for Wild Human Potential workshops), we have great respect for the importance of free functioning diaphragm, ribs and intercostal muscles.  You not only need this freedom to get the basic breath of energy to survive, you need the exquisite muscular interaction to create upright and forward thrust.  The cleaner it is, the more the rhythmical counteraction of the pelvis and shoulder girdles occur and the easier your legs swing forward and accept accept weight.

 

Imagine a rib chronically out of ideal alignment, an intercostal that spams, pulls or strains, a vertebra that is out of place. Any (or likely versions of all) will result in some level of inefficient respiration as well as inefficient posture and gait. Also interesting to consider is the person who hold his trunk in either chronic flexion or extension and how that interferes with breath, uprightness, and walking.

 

Watch both parts of this animated overview that pulls it all together nicely.

 

 

 

Come soon: 

Part IV:  Are You Ready to Share Your Personal Experience of Breathing and it's importance in your life?

Yet, we know that the lungs are mostly processors of oxygen once it arrives and not the engine that creates the action of breathing.  Here we begin to see one of the primary drivers of inhalation--the diaphragm.  Once you have watched the diaphragm in motion, take a look at the jellyfish in action. One can almost imagine diaphragms, free from the confines of the human body as jelly fish.  Or maybe it is jelly fish that were adapted for the human body.

This illustrated video (no real human bodies shown today) also has a few tidbits of anatomy that are good to know. 

3D View of Diaphragm

Jelly Fish

For those viewers that are somatic practitioners, movement/rehab therapists, exercise teachers, etc. there are important implications in understanding this function.  Please feel free to share some of those that you find important. We are all ears.

Next Part III: The Rib Basket Brings It All Home