Living a More Breathful Life
SunDo’s Effect on Respiratory Health & LONGEVITY
What if you could adopt a practice that enhances the effectiveness of your breathing and supercharges your immune system? What if this practice could improve your chances of fighting COVID-19 — the devastating respiratory virus which has spread to all parts of the globe?
SunDo is a meditation and breathwork discipline that not only helps lower blood pressure and activate the body’s relaxation response, it also creates a more flexible diaphragm, increases lung capacity, and greatly enhances oxygen intake. And over time, the practice can bring about a transformation of the mind. Many people find that SunDo practice gives them a better ability to focus and a more subtle understanding of themselves and the world. |
Applied correctly, SunDo is one of the most powerful ways to optimize the body and mind through breathing. Most of the time our respiratory system works automatically so we don’t have to think about it — it’s controlled by the autonomic half of the nervous system which keeps us alive even while we sleep. This type of habitual breathing changes in the face of environmental stressors. For instance, the act of taking bigger inhales or breathing rapidly prepares us for danger, like avoiding a nearby accident on the highway. While this “autopilot breathing” is helpful in many respects, falling into an unconscious breathing pattern can be harmful.
By not investing enough attention in our breath, it can become restricted – and if we are not aware of it, can get progressively worse with age. While a respiratory illness like COVID-19 is running rampant, it's a very dangerous time to overlook the practice of breathing well. Thanks to the ingenuity of human engineering, we have the automatic part covered. Now the time has come to investigate the power of actively managing and strengthening our breath.
It shouldn’t take a worldwide pandemic to get us to slow down and contemplate the way we breathe, but for better or worse, we are now faced with the realization that respiratory health will determine whether we may live or die from an acute illness.
Summary — Benefits of SunDo’s meditation and breathwork:
Classification of COVID-19 patients According to the National Library of Medicine, COVID-19 cases so far fall into one of five categories detailed below. |
Asymptomatic - The individual tests positive for COVID nucleic acid, but does not display any clinical symptoms.
Mild - The Patient has symptoms of upper respiratory tract infection (fever, fatigue, muscle pain, cough, sore throat, runny nose, and sneezing).
Moderate - The person has developed pneumonia (frequent fever, persistent cough and dyspnea) with no obvious hypoxemia (low level of oxygen in the blood). Chest CT scan shows lesions.
Severe - The patient has pneumonia, tachypnea and hypoxemia (with SpO2 or deficient oxygen saturation in their blood below 92%).
Critical - Severe complications develop: acute respiratory distress syndrome sets in (a deadly condition in which the lungs fill with fluid) and shock, encephalopathy, myocardial injury, heart failure, coagulation dysfunction, and acute kidney injury can occur.
While age, gender, and general health picture all factor into one’s risk of contracting COVID-19, and the severity of the case they may develop, recent reports have shown the virus can cause serious harm, and even death, to people of all ages and backgrounds. And even if we are confident in our immunity to symptomatic infection, asymptomatic carriers have proven one of the biggest problems to containment of the novel virus.
Shortness of breath and COVID-19: Dyspnea or Tachypea?
Doctors up to this point have had difficulty clearly diagnosing COVID-19 in its early stages as so many of its initial symptoms are shared with other illnesses like seasonal influenza, but one particular symptom is a dead giveaway — dyspnea, or what we commonly call “shortness of breath.” In later stages of illness as the lungs begin to fill with fluid, another symptom sets in: Tachypnea is very fast, shallow breathing where the patient seems to be breathing only within the throat. |
In the beginning, one of the first things SunDo practitioners are instructed to do, is to move away from the shallow, choppy breathing many of us absentmindedly slip into, and practice deeper, slower diaphragmatic breathing. Author of Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art James Nestor likens shallow breaths to rowing a boat with short, stilted strokes as opposed to longer, more fluid ones. Both methods may get us to our destination, but one seems to work far better.
“You want to make it very easy for your body to get air, especially if this is an act that we're doing 25,000 times a day,” says Nestor. “By just extending those inhales and exhales, by moving that diaphragm up and down a little more, you can have a profound effect on your blood pressure, on your mental state.”
And our unconscious reliance on shorter, inefficient breaths doesn’t just keep us from experiencing true wellbeing, it makes the reality of a virus that causes shortness of breath that much more dangerous. Individuals prone to anxious shallow breathing may exacerbate the severity of their cases and add to the complexity of an accurate diagnosis, should they contract the virus. Medpage Today explains the dangers of COVID-19 compounded by anxiety in greater detail in the linked article.
While this situation is alarming to many of us, Nestor sees a potential upside. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, he says “as hard as it might be to fathom now, there is a silver lining here: breathing is a missing pillar of health, and our attention to it is long overdue.”
So what exactly can we do to improve our respiratory health?
The refined breathwork of SunDo could be one answer. Slower rhythmic breathing triggers a soothing and rejuvenative theta wave state, which is optimal for deep relaxation, self-healing, clear-headedness, and strong immune function. These benefits help to curb our susceptibility to infection while also reducing the chance of dangerous complications arising from anxiety, whether due to shortness of breath or a general sense of worry in this stressful time.
A practice like SunDo validates an important principle: We cannot wait until our breathing becomes compromised and burdened with illness to learn how to breathe at our ideal capacity. We need to be proactive in our approach to give ourselves the critical tools needed to withstand a dangerous pandemic like COVID-19.
“You want to make it very easy for your body to get air, especially if this is an act that we're doing 25,000 times a day,” says Nestor. “By just extending those inhales and exhales, by moving that diaphragm up and down a little more, you can have a profound effect on your blood pressure, on your mental state.”
And our unconscious reliance on shorter, inefficient breaths doesn’t just keep us from experiencing true wellbeing, it makes the reality of a virus that causes shortness of breath that much more dangerous. Individuals prone to anxious shallow breathing may exacerbate the severity of their cases and add to the complexity of an accurate diagnosis, should they contract the virus. Medpage Today explains the dangers of COVID-19 compounded by anxiety in greater detail in the linked article.
While this situation is alarming to many of us, Nestor sees a potential upside. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, he says “as hard as it might be to fathom now, there is a silver lining here: breathing is a missing pillar of health, and our attention to it is long overdue.”
So what exactly can we do to improve our respiratory health?
The refined breathwork of SunDo could be one answer. Slower rhythmic breathing triggers a soothing and rejuvenative theta wave state, which is optimal for deep relaxation, self-healing, clear-headedness, and strong immune function. These benefits help to curb our susceptibility to infection while also reducing the chance of dangerous complications arising from anxiety, whether due to shortness of breath or a general sense of worry in this stressful time.
A practice like SunDo validates an important principle: We cannot wait until our breathing becomes compromised and burdened with illness to learn how to breathe at our ideal capacity. We need to be proactive in our approach to give ourselves the critical tools needed to withstand a dangerous pandemic like COVID-19.
How SunDo refines breath for optimal health and immunity
SunDo enables practitioners to override the autonomic nervous system and take control of how they breathe. Passed down for millenia in the Korean mountains, SunDo is not a simple quick-fix technique to use only in times of stress — rather, the discipline provides a systematic approach for refining the respiratory process that allows us to fully reclaim our ability to breathe deeply in daily life. Each practice level of SunDo is designed to move the practitioner safely and slowly from a beginner’s breathing rate to a style of deep breathwork that is profoundly calming and enriched with oxygen. It’s almost hard to believe a human being could breathe this way. |
At more advanced levels, practitioners experience a way of full body breathing that could also be described as energy breathing - where every cell in the body is being fueled with oxygen and Qi — the vital life force that exists inside each person.
By embracing many dimensions of health and wellness, SunDo offers you a gateway to optimal breathing unlike in any other practice. In times of a pandemic that disproportionately affects the elderly, it is especially important for us to start young, develop a regular practice routine, and maintain robust health and respiratory function into advanced age.
SunDo is an ancient tradition, yet it is very uniquely suited to the demands of modern times. It has been exclusively practiced by mountain hermits for the last 1000 years and has only been reintroduced into our current society within the last 50 years by the practice’s grandmaster Chung San and the masters who followed in his footsteps.
Breathwork can be very effective for enhancing one’s health, but only when done properly. To facilitate direct communication between teacher and student, SunDo is only offered at practice and retreat centers where it is taught by highly trained instructors. Because every person has developed a slightly different way of breathing, SunDo instructors work closely with students to ensure individual progress throughout each of the SunDo practice levels.
You have two options to try SunDo in a class setting. You may be able to locate a SunDo Practice Center near you, or you can attend a seasonal retreat at the SunDo Retreat Center. To enroll in a distance learning program, begin by registering for the five-day or three-day 2020 summer retreat from August 4th through 9th.
The timing has never been more urgent to begin a breathwork practice. Break free from autopilot breathing and tune in to the quality and depth of each and every breath you take. SunDo Breath Meditation can help improve the quality of your body and mind, grant you a longer, higher quality of life, and just may prevent an untimely death. |