Don't move! — Buteyko and the balloon in the belly. An interview with Sasha Yakovleva

Sasha Yakovleva teaches the breathing method of the Soviet physiologist Konstantin Buteyko. She came to it in 2008, when a severe flu left her husband Thomas, an asthmatic all his life, barely able to walk. Out of desperation she called the Buteyko Clinic in Moscow and reached Ludmila Buteyko, the doctor’s widow. They flew to Moscow, the method changed Thomas’s life, and both trained as specialists before being asked to represent it in the West. She describes the method as the outcome of years of work in a laboratory in Akademgorodok, the Siberian city of scientists, and its aim as the normalisation of breathing. Healthy breathing, as she teaches it, runs through the nose, makes no sound and cannot be seen: the diaphragm works, the belly stays still. She calls this reduced breathing. Buteyko held carbon dioxide in the lungs to be the main regulator of the body. Sasha links its loss to anxiety and allergy, and describes the narrowing airways of an asthma attack as the body’s defence against over-breathing. She teaches a mild, deliberate air hunger and asks people to attend to the inhalation only; the exhalation takes care of itself. She talks about children who breathe through the mouth, and about adenoids that stop causing trouble once the nose takes over. She is plain about the evidence: many trials in the Soviet Union, few in the West, nearly all of them on asthma. The myth she most wants gone is that any breathing technique is good for you. A commentary on the evidence, on the relation to pranayama and on a planned demonstration of the invisible breath follows.