Author's Note:
This is the mechanics of the Flying Air Game, which you are forbidden to participate in. I am only recording this information for historical purposes so people can try to figure out how I dissolved my meat body when I disappear from their world. The previous chapter discussed the philosophy behind my plan to replace a body of meat with a body of air. I present this Breathing section of my web book Unworlding as if it were instructions to you the reader, even though I'm only talking to myself.
--W. H. Early
There are two ways to spell the acronym that's pronounced 'matCHOO': MATIW stands for 'more air than I want' and MATYW stands for 'more air than you want'. In either case, it's the breather alone who decides how to breathe; no one can make you breathe a certain way. If you choose to breathe according to the Breath of Flight, or the Buzz Breath as I also call it since breathing this way gets you high and makes you feel non-physical vibrations, then it's your choice. If I were going to do it, I would make sure that I'm not going to have a hypoglycemic fit while doing the Buzz Breath, especially while playing in traffic. Hypoglycemia is caused by eating sweets and carbohydrates for the most part. Caffeine makes it worse. It makes you weak and shaky. Eating protein NOW is the temporary solution and never eating sweets is the cure. Diabetes is what you could get if you don't listen to my advice.
More to the point, I'd recommend never breathing like this unless you're lying down, sober, healthy in mind and body, comfortable, not in water, not in charge of machinery including rolling vehicles, children, or people more senile or less responsible than yourself.
Simply put, you could pass out, swoon, faint or hyperventilate doing any sort of breathing that you're not used to. So be in a setting where this will not get you killed, fired from your job, or thrown in the drunk tank.
I did this kind of breathing during all my waking hours for a month in 1980 and as a result I was in a month-long state of bliss. I experienced my first unworlding, an ecstatic dream, an ESP premonition that came true, effortlessly gave up all my bad habits cold turkey, and did I mention that I was in a state of bliss for a solid month? I was living at a hot springs in the High Sierra Mountains of Northern California, and my responsibilities were slim-to-none, so it was the perfect place for me to get blissed out for a month. It has taken over 35 years to partially replicate this state. At that time it was easy because I didn't know it was gonna happen, so when it did, I just kept breathing. I refused to stop. When I left the hot springs I definitely went back to being my lazy old self, with the exception that I have had the memory, ever since, of having been in a state of bliss for a solid month.
So here's what I do now to get that state back, but I have to stress that the bliss fades when the typical lazy breathing re-institutes itself. But five minutes of bliss per day is worth the trouble and I try to get a lot more than that.
The terminology 'more than I want' refers to resistance. The mind will rebel when you try this. Pent-up emotions might bubble to the surface under their own pressure, because we hold things in by not breathing very much. If you pay Attention, unless you're already a realized being, you'll Notice that you hold your breath a lot when you're thinking. It almost seems to take a solid intention or a shot of adrenalin or something to breathe deeply and connectedly. If you suddenly get weak and hungry, in my case this is hypoglycemia. The first several times I tried this, I started craving pizza so bad I had to stop. So being well nourished or else very healthy could be essential, depending on your age, but a recently-filled stomach is not helpful because it will gurgle and slosh.
Before attempting the Breath of Flight a.k.a. the Buzz Breath, make sure you have practiced deep breathing first. Then you'll have some knowledge of the best way to breathe, but while actually doing the Buzz Breath, just breathe in whatever way is the most comfortable for getting More Air Than You Want. Deep breathing is done by pushing your abdomen out on the inhale and then expanding the rib cage while filling the upper part of the lungs. A full inhale, well topped-off, will result in motion of the collarbones, shoulders, and/or eyebrows. There's no need to be too formal about all this while actually doing the Buzz Breath because it's a distraction, but you'll get better results if you actually know how to breath right before you start.
The right way to exhale is to just release the extended muscles of the torso. The relaxation of the stress from the inhale will push the air out. There's no reason to force the last drop of air out of the lungs because this will not be done during the Breath of Flight.
You also have to know about connected or circular breathing. This just means you won't ever be holding your breath in the simple version. The more complicated Wim Hof breath is allowed, in which you hold still as long as possible without breathing at all after the 30th exhale, then take one more inhale and hold it as long as you can. This is strenuous, but Wim Hof has climbed Mt. Everest in his underwear, so I guess it makes you strong or crazy or something. My interest in this facet of the practice--the holding part--is that it makes me face my fear of suffocation by relaxing. But the first step is to master the correct full breath: abdomen goes out on the inhale and when the bottom of the lungs are full, chest cavity expands, which is mostly noticed in the rib cage moving out to the sides. Relax completely to release air on the exhale. This is all smoothly done, not jerky.
Once you know what it means to take a full breath and breathe continuously without forgetting to--without accidentally holding your breath or reverting to shallow breathing--you can start practicing MATIW or the Breath of Flight or the Buzz Breath or whatever you want to call it. Besides Wim Hof, this sort of breathing has been taught by others including Leonard Orr, Sevan Bomar, Alan Dolan, Stanislav Grof, and others. It's also similar to the bellows breath or bhastrika pranayama of the Hindu practices, but the bellows breath has been around so long that every teacher has his own dogmatic way of teaching it. The purpose of the Buzz Breath is to make you buzz.
Once you get around the resistance to breathing more air than you want, the first sign that you're getting that much air is that you'll feel shivers going up the spine and maybe up the back of your head. You'll get tingling in fingers and toes, maybe a kind of pulsing or throbbing sensation in your face, and possible flashes of hot or cold. You might then forget to breathe for a minute and slip into unconsciousness. If you're doing this out in the garden on an empty stomach and you suddenly stand up, you will pass out. That's why you should be well fed and lying down. The instructions below will help if energy buzz symptoms don't occur. If the symptoms are too extreme right away, the instructions below will help too: don't follow them to such an extreme degree. So here's the key to the buzz factor.
Emphasis on the inhale is fullness and completeness. Don't strain your chest because you could irritate your lungs or pull a muscle. Breathing habits should be changed gradually overall, especially if you're not a spring chicken anymore. But fullness should be somewhat more than what you're used to. No need to breathe fast or slow, I prefer a comfortable rate on the inhale because anything else distracts from getting that buzz on. Possibly due to my age and the fact that I smoked tobacco for 26 years--even though I stopped over 13 years ago--I sometimes can't get more air than I want. Lately I'm finding that if I purse my lips to jet the air in on the inhale, I have time to take a full inhale, whereas if I open my mouth as wide as possible, then my torso seems to reach its maximum expansion before my lungs get full. On the exhale the mouth should open wide.
If you're doing it right, five to ten breaths should see results, buzzwise.
You can breathe through the nostrils if you want but it takes more effort in my case to get the lungs full. But don't get too hung up on overly filling the lungs--don't take any of this to an extreme--because it's the disproportionality factor that leads to the buzz.
The exhale should seem disproportionately short and quick compared to the inhale. Again there's no rush, but if you relax the torso completely the air comes out pretty fast, and then do not force out every drop of air, just pause for a split second to recalibrate the mechanism and start another inhale. The reason the mechanism needs to be recalibrated by a short pause at the end of the exhale is that the disproportionality factor will get you discombobulated and the tiny pause after the exhale helps to prevent this, so you can keep up a steady rhythm. Jerking, straining, forcing, and rushing are not good. Breathing like this should be enjoyable and sustainable. For me, resistance is almost always there. When it completely disappears and the air is breathing you, that's called 'breath release'. When you stop breathing for a minute because you don't need to, that's called 'suspension of breath'. It's normal and harmless. Your blood gases are just readjusting to their accustomed proportions.
I learned this type of breathing in the late 1970s from followers of Leonard Orr, the founder of 'rebirthing' who is now a proponent of 'physical immortality'. He's quite an entertaining speaker but we didn't get along back when he had money and I didn't. If I ever get rich, I'm sure we'd get along just fine.
During a rebirthing session, which lasts anywhere from 45 minutes to 3 hours, the breathing coach keeps telling you to breathe more, because you'll want to stop due to resistance. I used to have a lot of microsleeps with little dreams. Eventually, by breathing more air than I wanted, the vibrations would get very strong and I would get a condition called 'tetany' which I found quite pleasurable. We used to call it 'the creeping crud'. Tetany is harmless; it's when your fingers, toes, and/or lips curl up involuntarily. I guess the reason this is enjoyable is that by this time you will be so high on air that you'd enjoy just about anything. I've experienced tetany many times and it is completely harmless. I've never experienced it without a breathing coach pushing me to breath more, more, more. On my own I generally do microsleeps instead since my focus is unworlding and not feeling like a paralytic or spastic. Tetany is not related to tetanus.
My practice of breathwalking involves walking down a dirt road doing the Buzz Breath. I often have to stop and check to see whether I'm about to pass out, because I don't notice till I stop walking. When I stand still, I can tell how dizzy I am. Walking fast seems to keep me from getting dizzy. But it's a pleasant, throbbing dizziness, unlike the spinning dizziness you get from drinking too much, which makes you puke. There is no spinning or nausea, so 'dizziness' is really the wrong word. Maybe 'lightheaded' is a better description. Technically, I'd say you're dissolving the world, which is what really happens when we go to sleep or pass out. I think the energy sensations are the same as those of unworlding, but then I think the moon is made of green cheese, so don't take my word for it.
If you try breathwalking without first getting plenty of experience so that you know what to expect, then you could pass out in public. I tried this once. Remember everyone has a cell phone and you might have to pay for an ambulance if one is called. If you do pass out, you might appear to be not breathing for a minute (because you don't need to) so you might wake up with some mall cop performing CPR on you, and when the ambulance arrives you'll already be auto-revived and ready to do some more breathing, but the ambulance driver will be writing out a bill, demanding your insurance, etc.
That's one reason why I left the U.S.: so I could breathe as much as I wanted to without getting thrown in jail.
