Breathing exercises

The single most repeated element across all of Aajonus's breathing instruction was the importance of holding the breath after the inhale before expelling it. His criticism of ordinary breathing during exercise was specific: "most people will breathe, hyper-breathe. And they're not even using half of the oxygen that is in their lungs before they're expelling it." In his framework, exhaling before the lungs have absorbed the available oxygen means the respiratory muscles are burning energy and nutrients for movement without delivering the benefit that movement is supposed to produce.

His solution was to train himself to use all the oxygen before releasing it. During his year and a half of intensive running, which eventually extended to 13 miles per day barefoot on concrete and gravel in freezing rain, he forced himself to breathe rhythmically and slowly even while sprinting. He would take two to four seconds to inhale completely, hold the breath, then exhale for the same duration. This meant his lungs were not "going like this" in rapid shallow cycles, burning large amounts of energy through sheer muscular movement while delivering diminished oxygen to the blood. Because the lung was completing the absorption before exhaling, his circulatory demand during exercise was lower, his heart rate stayed controlled even at high speeds, and when he stopped running, his heart rate returned to normal within two to three minutes rather than the ten to fifteen minutes typical of trained athletes who had not applied this approach.

At a cardiac examination conducted 25 years after that exercise period, cardiologists found that when he performed their test exercise, his heart rate returned to completely normal "within two seconds of stopping the exercise," which they described as highly unusual given that their graphs typically show a gradual descent over ten to fifteen minutes. He attributed this directly to how he had trained his breathing.

During the years he was surviving multiple cancers and the chronic pain that accompanied them, Aajonus used deliberate breathing as his primary tool for managing pain without sleep or sedation, since he could only sleep about ten minutes at a time unless submerged in a bathtub. He began at a count of five: inhale to a count of five, hold to a count of five, exhale to a count of five. He practiced this ten hours per day. Over approximately five years of consistent practice in this way, combined with the raw diet and general healing, his capacity expanded progressively.

By the end of that period he could inhale over a count of two minutes, hold for a count of two minutes, and exhale over a count of approximately one and a half minutes, making a complete breath cycle of approximately five and a half to six minutes per breath. He described this explicitly: "one breath every six minutes." This brought his heartbeat down to 40 or 41 beats per minute and reduced his blood pressure substantially. He noted that yogic practitioners aim for similar states through breath retention, and his results paralleled those outcomes.

He also described an intermediate stage in which he was doing "one breath every five minutes," with each phase of the breath taking a minute and a half: "I would take the air in. It would take me a minute and a half to breathe the air in completely. I would hold it for a minute and a half and exhale for a minute and a half or longer."

He used the phrase "a kind of self-hypnosis" to describe the psychological state this sustained focus on breath counting created, which allowed him to survive his many heart attacks by preventing the panic and physical tension that cause muscle cramping to become fatal.

When Aajonus was exercising, he applied a modified version of the same principle. He did not hold his breath for extended meditative counts the way he did in yogic practice, but he maintained a conscious rhythm and did not allow his breathing to become rapid and shallow. He breathed approximately every five to ten seconds, in and out slowly, even while running. "I would make sure that it took me two to three, four seconds to inhale, hold it, exhale for the same amount of time."

He distinguished explicitly between exercise-phase breathing and rest-phase breathing practice: "I always regulated my breath. I didn't do the because that exercises your lungs and you're spending a lot of your nutrients on breathing in and out of the lungs. So I forced myself to breathe slowly. I didn't hold my breath as you do in yoga exercises. And I did a lot of yoga exercises to control breathing when I wasn't exercising."

The implication is that during exercise, holding the breath is not a long meditative hold but rather a brief functional hold sufficient to ensure the oxygen is absorbed before exhalation. During rest-phase yoga breathing practice, the holds were extended to counts of minutes. These are two separate applications of the same underlying principle.

Because he applied this discipline consistently, running did not leave him gasping. "When I'd stop running, it was three minutes, and my heartbeat was normal, and my breathing was relaxed and normal. Even while I was running, I was rhythmically breathing." When running 13 miles, including through freezing rain and over gravel, he would stop and not be panting. His heart rate during that running period was reportedly 100 beats per minute throughout, and this was true even during the run itself, not just after stopping.

Aajonus described having fifty heart attacks in his lifetime, the majority of which he survived by applying specific breathing technique combined with muscular relaxation. He explained that a heart attack is mechanically a charley horse, a muscle spasm caused by a chemical irritant arresting the heart muscle. If a person panics and tenses up, the cramp is locked in. If the muscle remains in cramp for more than six minutes, brain death results. The path through a heart attack was to relax completely, not tense the body, and breathe in a controlled slow pattern.

The specific protocol he described for acute cardiac events was: breathe slowly, not deeply, taking in approximately half of a normal intake of air, then hold for the same duration, then exhale for the same duration. He used a count of four as the example for general instruction: "Inhale to a count of four slowly, hold to a four, and then exhale to a count of four." The counting pace he specified was "one ohm, two ohm, three ohm, four ohm" for each phase.

He was explicit that deep breathing during a cardiac event is contraindicated because filling the lungs to capacity creates pressure on the heart, which exacerbates the muscle cramp rather than relieving it. "Breathe slowly, not deeply, because you put pressure on the heart, again, and you cause the muscle to cramp more." The remedy is half-volume slow breaths held to an even count.

He stated he had "helped hundreds of people through it just by doing that," and he described one woman with three heart bypasses who was on his diet and managed subsequent cardiac events using this approach.

For heart irregularities or palpitations that are less acute, he recommended what he called Prana Yama breathing: inhale to the count of seven, hold to the count of seven, and exhale to the count of seven. This formulation appeared in written correspondence and represented his adaptation of the yogic pranayama breath retention technique to cardiac support.

One of Aajonus's most consistently stated and firmly held positions on respiratory illness was that lying down during any lung detoxification is the worst thing a person can do. This applies to colds, flu, pneumonia, and any condition in which the lungs are actively detoxifying.

His mechanical explanation was straightforward: when the lungs are detoxifying, whether eliminating something recently inhaled or releasing stored old material, the lung muscles are weakened. Some muscles are not functioning, reducing respiratory capacity. In that state, gravity in the prone position pushes the lungs toward closure. Without sufficient muscular and glandular tone to hold them open, the weakened lungs cannot resist the gravitational compression and begin to collapse.

When a person sits upright, or even reclines at a significant angle in a chair, gravity operates in the opposite direction relative to lung structure, pushing the lungs open rather than closed. He stated: "The lungs can't collapse this way. They can only collapse this way," indicating upright versus horizontal orientation.

His instruction was to sleep in a sitting or near-sitting position during any lung illness: in a recliner, a leisure chair, or propped significantly upright. For infants and small children with colds or respiratory illness, he recommended a position equivalent to a baby's car seat angle. He said explicitly: "don't lie down. Sit up, even if it's at an angle like this in one of those relaxed chairs."

He applied this principle to his AIDS patient who had already survived pneumonia three times before coming to him, each time treated with antibiotics. He told her she needed to survive a bout of pneumonia without stopping it, and that the reason she felt she could not breathe was entirely because she was working against gravity by lying down. He instructed her to sleep sitting up at a slight angle so gravity kept the lungs pushed open. When pneumonia came ten days later, she followed this instruction, went through it without antibiotics, and was out of bed and fully functional three days after the pneumonia broke. He noted she had not been functional at that level for a long time.

He also described the nighttime component of this problem: during neurological detoxification at night, nerves shut down, which further reduces respiratory muscle capacity. He compared it to "running two lanes on a six-lane highway." In that state, gravity pressing the lungs closed at night becomes the primary reason people wake in panic believing they cannot breathe and seek emergency care. The solution is not hospitalization but correct sleeping position.

Coughing, in his framework, is part of the body's mechanism for keeping the lungs open during detoxification, not a symptom to be suppressed. He said "coughing keeps the lungs open and working" and that the lungs will not need to push open through coughing as much when a person is seated upright, because upright posture is already holding them open passively.

Aajonus made a practical distinction between rapid shallow breathing during exercise, which he considered wasteful of nutrients, and slow rhythmic breathing, which conserved them. Rapid breathing during physical activity requires the lung muscles to move quickly and repeatedly, spending nutrients on that muscular work without achieving efficient oxygen absorption. He described observing other runners who were breathing very fast: "I'm saying, wait a minute, you're pushing the lungs too hard. You're making them work very fast. But are they working efficiently?"

By forcing himself to take deeper, slower, held breaths even while running, he allowed the lungs to complete their oxygen exchange before the next cycle. This meant the lungs themselves were not consuming large amounts of energy and nutrients through sheer muscular effort. The practical consequence was that after completing a run, he was not depleted. "Other than needing to sleep, I wasn't weak. I wasn't out of breath." He was able to sprint and still remain in this controlled rhythmic state.

He used the analogy of a highway with lanes shut down during detoxification, but in the exercise context, the point was simply mechanical efficiency: slow deliberate breathing extracts more oxygen per breath than rapid breathing, making the respiratory system more productive with fewer total breaths.

Aajonus positioned singing as the most strenuous exercise available to the human body, in part because of the breath control it demands. Producing a singing tone requires controlling "the muscles to the lung, how much air goes out, how fast, how it goes through the vocal cords, how broad or small your mouth opening is to get the right pitch." All of these controls simultaneously engage the diaphragm, chest muscles, throat muscles, mouth aperture muscles, and neurological coordination, making it equivalent in his description to twenty minutes of singing being comparable to one hour on a treadmill.

This matters for breathing exercises because singing is essentially a directed form of breath control practice combined with physical exertion. He recommended it specifically for people who cannot perform standard exercise due to injury, illness, or lack of physical energy, but who are producing hormones that require expenditure through activity. For such people, singing is the available outlet, and it requires exactly the kind of sustained breath management he advocated in his breathing protocols.

In contexts of environmental contamination, Aajonus described training himself to breathe in through his nose and out through his mouth as a protective measure. He used a folded organic cotton handkerchief rolled into multiple layers, placed over the nostrils and under the nose, strapped into place, so that all inhaled air had to pass through multiple layers of fabric before reaching the nasal passages. He stated: "all the poisons have to go through all these layers to get there."

He described learning to maintain this breathing pattern even during sleep, noting it sometimes caused snoring that woke him but that he returned to sleep immediately. He said it was trainable: "You just have to focus on training yourself breathing in your nose and out your mouth." He also described using an Israeli gas mask in more severe contamination situations, such as in a vehicle at a border crossing.

This nose-only inhalation with mouth exhalation represented for him a practical environmental breathing protocol distinct from the therapeutic breath retention exercises, but it shares the same framework logic: the body needs protection from what enters the respiratory system, and deliberate control of the breathing pathway is the mechanism for providing that protection.

In We Want To Live, Aajonus placed breathing in the same tier of importance as nutrition, describing oxygen as "as important as nutrition" and stating that "every cell in the body" depends on the oxygen supply provided by breathing. Learning to breathe properly from the diaphragm, slowly and fully, is described as producing three simultaneous benefits: increased mental clarity, increased physical energy, and improved emotional balance.

He also described breathing exercises in terms of their effect on both oxygen and carbon dioxide utilization, not merely oxygen intake. "Breathing exercises increase oxygen and carbon dioxide utilization. Therefore, breathing exercises increase health of body and mind." This framing suggests he considered the whole gas exchange cycle to be the relevant unit of function, not simply maximizing oxygen intake in isolation.

The practical consequence of poor breathing in his framework was chronic fatigue, inability to take full breaths, and a persistent sensation of not getting enough oxygen. He described poor lung function as producing these symptoms when the lungs are not absorbing oxygen efficiently, whether from scarring, detoxification load, toxic inhalation damage, or simple lack of practiced breath control.