BREATHING AND BUDO

In whatever form of Budo or martial arts you may practice, there should always be a focus and emphasis placed on consciously controlling one’s breathing. Breathing is essential to life as well as to the purification of body, mind, and spirit; indeed, breathing connects both our physical selves with our emotional selves. In Budo, students (especially) will end to hold their breath. Actually, if you care to think about it and admit it to yourself, we all are guilty of this from time to time. This is both a reaction to stress as well as a bi-product of concentrating almost too hard on technique. It is often a failing of many dojo and sensei, that proper breathing techniques, and coordination of breathing with movement are not taught or only lightly touched upon. Breathing creates a connection and a joining of both our mind and our body, which must be one if we are to succeed at our art.

In the next few days, we will look a bit at breathing and try to learn some good and useful breathing techniques, particularly derived from Tai Chi, which have direct application to us as Budo-ka.
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.Copyright 2008 by Hayato Tokugawa, Aoi Tokugawa, Sekishinkan Tokugawa Dojo & Takayama Budokai. All rights reserved.