Ancient Breathworks

"I was born and grew up in Korea. I had the opportunity to learn and practise traditional qigong, meditation, and Tai Chi. I was licensed as a medical doctor in 2007, and I became aware of myself as an energy healer in 2015. I provide personal healing sessions and teachings, online and offline."

The fuller version of the same story, from the record on this site: "I entered Korea University's medical college and, that same year, found a Tai Chi master practising near the campus. Both trainings started at once and neither has stopped. It took me fifteen years to work out that they were the same subject." That second training — Tai Chi first, then Qigong, then the breath-centred traditions this course draws on — ran alongside the medical one for two decades before either became something he taught.

Also in his own words, from the same record: "Adrenal fatigue, probably. Burnout, certainly. I had a full medical education and it was not enough to get me back. So I tried everything — and what worked was not what I had been taught." Breathwork was part of what worked. This course is downstream of that — not a technique adopted as philosophy, but one that did something measurable for its own teacher first.

"Breath is very important for healing. Basically, you breathe energy. If your energy capacity is low, you will feel drained, fatigued, exhausted easily. You can build up more capacity with breathwork. It is also energetic alignment — your chakras and energy channels will be aligned through breathwork. Then your energy flow will be more fluent, and you will feel more energetic, in a higher vibration, and you could access a different state of mind through breathwork. There are so many breathworks today, and each has its own effects and benefits. I'm going to teach you ancient breathworks, transmitted for thousands of years."

Chronic sympathetic activation — the stress response left switched on because nothing tells it to switch off — is about as well established in modern medicine as physiology gets. It is not one alarm bell but a standing bias: elevated resting heart rate, blunted heart-rate variability, disrupted sleep architecture, and a nervous system that treats ordinary friction as threat. None of that requires a tradition to diagnose. It shows up on a wearable — the same drained, fatigued, exhausted state described above, in a different vocabulary.

What is harder to find is a lever. Most of what drives that standing bias — work, news, other people, the pace of a city — is not something you can switch off by deciding to. The breath is the exception this whole course is built on: the one part of that system you can reach directly, on purpose, in the middle of the day it is happening.

Not belief. Not twenty minutes you don't have. A handful of practices, each one explained at the tier its evidence actually supports, applied consistently enough to notice what changes and what doesn't. That is the whole method — the same one the instructor applied to his own case before teaching it to anyone else.

"We will look into four different breathworks. They are from different lineages. The first one is from Theravada Buddhism and the foundation for mindfulness. It's very passive — you just sit and observe your breathing. The other breathwork, from the Sundo tradition, is quite similar to the first one. The difference is to count how long you breathe. The other two breathworks are quite active: fire breathing and Nauli from Hatha Yoga is quite active, and you should hold after breathing out. And the last one is from Tibet, and you should hold after inhalation — that's the difference between the breathing from Hatha Yoga and Tibetan yoga."

"With these techniques, you could become more aware of your internal sense — your mind and body. This course consists of very short practices, so I encourage you to practise by yourself for a longer time — consistency is key. With repeated practice, we feel more energetic and mindful. I hope you enjoy the classes, and your practice."

Named plainly, since the clip titles alone don't spell it out: the passive lineage is Ānāpānasati (l16) and the counting practices (l14, l15); the active pair is kapalabhati and Nauli (l18–l21), both from Hatha Yoga; the Tibetan practice is Tsa Lung Trul Khor (l22, l23), which holds the breath in rather than out. Retention itself (l13) sits between the two active lineages, because both draw on it directly.

The order below follows the same rule every lineage in this course was trained under: smoothness before strength. 調息 — smoothing the breath (l12) — is the foundational practice everything else builds on, and comes before any of the four lineages he names above. Nothing later in the sequence is safe to skip to.

Believe a mechanism to feel an effect. Push through pain, dizziness or air hunger. Take any technique further than its own lesson's safety notes allow. This course's whole claim to trust is that it says, plainly, which parts are measured and which parts are the accumulated observation of people who practised carefully for a very long time before anyone could measure anything.

Of everything your body must do to stay alive, exactly one function sits under both automatic and voluntary control. Your heartbeat is not consultable. Digestion does not take requests. Hormones will not be negotiated with directly. The breath alone runs perfectly well without you — and hands you the controls the moment you reach for them.

That dual wiring is not a curiosity; it is a door. The breath is driven by the same brainstem machinery that runs the rest of the autonomic household, so when you deliberately change how you breathe, you are — uniquely — operating a lever inside a control room you otherwise cannot enter.

The traditions put the same fact differently. In the framework I teach, breath bridges the physical body and the energy body: it is the one process you can watch cross between deliberate and automatic, between what you do and what you are. Sanskrit, Chinese, Greek and Hebrew each use one word for breath and spirit — prāṇa, 氣 in its breath-aspect, pneuma, ruach. Whole civilisations found the two inseparable enough to share a noun.

You do not need to adopt the metaphysics to use the door. You need only notice what the next lesson lays out: that the physiological claims, at least, are now measured.

호흡 — 의식적으로 조절할 수 있는 유일한 생명 유지 작용.

One idea per lesson, one practice at a time, and the evidence level marked on every claim. You will not be asked to breathe in any way that hurts, and you will never be asked to believe a mechanism to feel an effect. Slow practice first; the stronger techniques come later, with their cautions attached.

Slow breathing changes autonomic state, measurably and quickly. Around six breaths per minute, breathing synchronises with the baroreflex — the pressure-sensing loop between heart and brainstem — and heart-rate variability rises markedly; vagal (parasympathetic) activity increases; blood pressure drops modestly in many people. Respiratory sinus arrhythmia — the heart speeding slightly on the inhale and slowing on the exhale — is textbook physiology, and it is why exhale-weighted breathing calms: you are leaning on the slowing phase.

Reviews of slow-breathing studies (Zaccaro and colleagues, 2018; Lehrer and Gevirtz, 2014, on resonance breathing) converge on the same core: increased HRV, increased alpha-band brain activity, reduced reported anxiety and arousal. The effects are real, repeatable, and honest in size — a practice, not a cure.

Heart-rate-variability 'coherence' as a trainable trait with downstream health effects; slow breathing as adjunct care in hypertension, anxiety disorders and insomnia; breath-paced practice changing inflammatory markers. Each of these has published support and each has open questions — small samples, short follow-ups, enthusiastic labs. I use these findings; I do not lean my full weight on them, and neither should you.

That specific breath patterns move energy through specific pathways; that the breath links the dense body to subtler ones; that a room full of people breathing together produces something more than synchronised physiology. This is the tier of lived practice — millennia of it, carefully recorded, never yet instrumented. I teach it as what it is: the accumulated field notes of the traditions, and of my own clinic.

Breathwork is having a moment, and the marketing has outrun the measurements. If you read claims that a breathing technique cures disease, alkalises blood, or replaces medication — walk away, whatever the technique. Respiratory physiology is strong exactly because its claims are bounded. The practices in this course stay inside those bounds.

References

1. Zaccaro, A. et al. (2018). How Breath-Control Can Change Your Life: A Systematic Review on Psycho-Physiological Correlates of Slow Breathing. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 12, 353.●The review behind the established tier above.
2. Lehrer, P. M. & Gevirtz, R. (2014). Heart rate variability biofeedback: how and why does it work? Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 756.●The mechanism case for resonance-frequency breathing.
3. Bernardi, L. et al. (2001). Effect of rosary prayer and yoga mantras on autonomic cardiovascular rhythms: comparative study. BMJ, 323(7327), 1446–1449.●The Ave Maria and the mantra both pace breathing to six per minute — the traditions found the frequency first.

"Anapana means inhalation and exhalation. Sati means mindfulness. So anapanasati means mindfulness of breathing. It is the foundation for Buddhist meditation, taught by Shakyamuni Buddha. The Buddha said this practice would bring great benefit to develop mindfulness for awakening. Simply, you watch your breathing: when you breathe in, your consciousness recognises that you breathe in; when you breathe out, your consciousness recognises that you breathe out. While you're breathing in and out, you train your mind to be sensitive to the body, the energy, and the mind itself. We are going to practise basic breathworks from anapanasati."

Ānāpānasati — literally mindfulness (sati) of in-breath and out-breath (āna-apāna) — is laid out in the Pali canon's Ānāpānasati Sutta as sixteen stages across four groups: awareness of the body, of feeling-tone, of the mind itself, and of mental objects. What unites all sixteen is what it does not ask: at no stage are you told to breathe slower, deeper, or longer. The breath stays exactly as it already is — matching "you watch your breathing" above — and the training is entirely in the attention watching it.

That is the tradition l14 and l15 draw on directly. Counting the exhale or the inhale, resetting to one the moment the count is lost — that reset is not a failure interrupting an attention practice. It is the attention practice, in exactly the sense the sutta describes: noticing the mind has wandered is itself the moment of mindfulness, not a lapse in it.

l12's smoothing practice and the fire-breathing and Nauli lessons later in this course are control practices — you are deliberately changing the breath's pace, depth or force. The counting practices are the opposite kind of training, and confusing the two changes how you should judge your own progress. In a control practice, a shaky result means the technique needs work. In an attention practice, a shaky count is the data, not the failure — it is telling you, honestly, how long your attention currently holds before it moves.

"In Eastern Asian philosophy, there are five elements of life — fire, water, metal, wood, and earth. If these five elements of your body are well balanced, you must be healthy; otherwise, you might have a problem. You can diagnose the balanced state of your five elements through observing your breathing. A longer exhalation than inhalation reflects an imbalance of the fire element, to your heart. A longer inhalation than exhalation reflects an imbalance of the water element, to your kidney. A windy or noisy breath reflects an imbalance of the metal element, to your lung. An interrupted or frequently paused breath reflects an imbalance of the wood element, to your liver. A breath showing a combination of the previous four reflects an imbalance of the earth element, to your stomach. So you can diagnose your five elements' balance state through breathing."

The same five correspondences appear in Cheng & Kan's 2005 account of Sun-style Xingyi — the internal martial art system founded by Sun Lutang (1860–1933) — as part of that lineage's Santi-posture training. Two unrelated sources describing the same five-way mapping is a better footing than either alone, though it does not by itself establish whether his own teaching traces to that specific lineage or arrived by a different route — see this lesson's `needs`.

That source adds one detail his own clip doesn't mention: it treats listening to the breath as already beginning to even it out, so noticing which pattern is present is the practice itself, not a preliminary to it — the same relationship l16 describes between noticing a lost count and the counting practice.

Reading a breath pattern as a sign of an organ-system imbalance is a traditional Chinese medicine correspondence claim, not a clinically validated diagnostic test — held at observation tier here for the same reason the site holds every traditional correspondence claim there, including the five-phase mapping itself (see the wu-xing glossary term). It is a disciplined, centuries-old way of noticing something real about your own breath; it is not a substitute for medical evaluation of an actual breathing complaint, and this course does not present it as one.

References

1. Cheng, P. Z. & Kan, J. (2005). Sun Lutang's Martial Enlightenment & Structural Mechanics. Kung Fu Magazine (Sep/Oct).○Independent documentation of the same five breathing patterns and their five-phase correspondences.

"In the previous class we learned how breathing reflects an imbalance of the five elements. Vice versa, you can balance the five elements through breathing. In the Sundo tradition of northeastern Asia, even breathing has been emphasised — to breathe as gently as possible and as smoothly as possible, and try to make the inhalation and exhalation even. And if you get used to it, you count your breathing — not only when you breathe out or in, you count how long you breathe."

l17 taught you to listen for which of five patterns your breath currently shows. This lesson names the target that listening is aimed at: not any particular pace, but evenness — an inhale and exhale of roughly equal length, breathed as gently and smoothly as the body allows. The traditions treat noticing and correcting as one continuous act here, the same relationship l16 and l17 both already describe for their own practices.

"Sundo" is this transcript's own name for the lineage — the same tradition l3 names as the source of the counting practices, which is exactly where this lesson points next: once even breathing is familiar enough that it holds on its own, counting becomes the next layer on top of it, not a separate skill.

"The most popular breath work from yoga must be fire breathing, or breath of fire. Breath of fire is a form of kapalabhati. Kapala means skull; pati means shining, or illuminating. Kapalabhati is one of six practices taught in Hatha Yoga for internal cleansing. There are three forms of kapalabhati — one is fire breathing; the other two use water to cleanse the nostrils."

"Fire breathing is forceful breath work. You contract your abdominal muscles to breathe out, and your body relaxes naturally to breathe in, without effort. It's passive, and all breaths are through your nose — so it's cleansing your nostrils, and cleansing your energy channels. It's also energising and heating; if you're in cold weather, it will be helpful."

Kapalabhati is one of Hatha Yoga's six classical cleansing techniques (ṣaṭkarma), alongside nauli later in this course. l12's smoothing practice trains long, even, quiet breath that calms; kapalabhati is rapid, forceful and stimulating — closer to controlled hyperventilation than to rest. Both are legitimate parts of a breath tradition, and mistaking one for a faster version of the other is the most common error a newcomer makes.

Rapid forceful breathing measurably shifts blood gases — CO₂ drops, and practitioners commonly report a lightheaded, energised, alert state during and immediately after. That physiological shift is not in dispute. What is much less settled is the traditional claim that the practice 'cleanses' in any broader sense, or that it detoxifies specific organs — those claims belong to the tradition's own framework and are not independently established in the physiological literature at the level the traditional language implies.

His own caution, stated plainly: "you should be cautious if you have blood pressure issues, heart problems, ear problems, or eye problems. And you should practice when your stomach is empty."

Standard yoga-therapy guidance goes further still — pregnancy, epilepsy or a seizure history, recent abdominal surgery, and hernia are commonly added to that list. That broader list is drafted conservatively from general guidance, not from his own protocol, and awaits his confirmation that it belongs alongside his own. If you feel dizzy, faint, or unwell at any point, stop and return to normal breathing — do not push through.

"We are going to practice fire breathing. I'm going to show you my body. When you breathe out, you contract your abdominal muscles. Air go out through your nose. You don't contract chest or shoulder to breathe out. You use only abdominal muscles. Then your muscles get naturally relaxed and passively breathe in."

"So let's practice slowly 12 times... Okay, we did it 12 times of fire breathing, and you're going to practice a little bit faster — 33 times... Okay, we practiced 33 times of fire breathing. You can practice faster or longer time. And I encourage you to practice this daily basis. You'll feel more energized and more motivated."

His own structure is two rounds, not one fixed target: twelve breaths at a slower pace first, then thirty-three faster once the mechanics are established — abdomen doing all the work on the exhale, chest and shoulders staying out of it entirely, the inhale left passive. He names no round count beyond thirty-three and no upper limit — "you can practice faster or longer time" is offered as room to grow into, not a target to reach immediately.

What this clip does not include is a stopping signal — no equivalent of l18's clip 18 counterpart naming dizziness or tingling as expected sensations, or naming a point past which to stop. Until that exists, l18's general cautions are what governs this practice, not anything stated here.

Every classical pranayama system includes kumbhaka — the deliberate pause, lungs full or empty. Held after the exhale, the pause lets carbon dioxide rise; held after the inhale, it adds a pressure component. The felt effects are quick and unmistakable: heat, intensity, and a distinct shift in mental state that the traditions prized and modern practitioners rediscovered.

Physiologically, much of retention practice is training your chemoreflex — the alarm system that responds to rising CO₂. That alarm is set conservatively in most modern people; retention, practised carefully, recalibrates your relationship to it. Practised carelessly, it is a way to faint.

Never practise retention in or near water — shallow-water blackout kills strong swimmers precisely because breath training silences the alarm that would have saved them. Never while driving or standing. Not during pregnancy. Not with significant cardiovascular disease, uncontrolled blood pressure, or a history of fainting or seizures, unless your own physician has cleared it. Dizziness or tingling means stop — not push through — and sit until it passes.

None of this is ceremony. Every rule on that list is written from incidents.

This lesson describes retention; the guided retention practices unlock after Dr. Kwon has reviewed your journal baseline from the earlier lessons. Strong tools, in order.

The traditions sequenced breath training the same way in every lineage: smoothness before strength. 調息 first, for months, then retention on that foundation. The modern appetite runs the other way — straight to the dramatic technique — and the modern injury pattern follows from it. This course keeps the old order, because the old order was load-bearing.

"Nauli is famous for its weird movement. Some people call it alien yoga. By the way, it's a great practice to cleanse your internal organs. It is very difficult to perform now at the first time, but step by step you'll be more aware of your internal organs and more able to clean and energize them."

"It's good to practice in the morning before breakfast. You can massage and activate your internal organs. You can also train your abdominal muscles and core strength."

Nauli is the second of the classical cleansing practices this course names, and the more demanding of the two. The practitioner exhales fully, holds the breath out (bahya kumbhaka — external retention, the empty-lung counterpart to the retention l13 introduces), and then isolates and rolls the abdominal recti muscles — first centring them, then rolling them left, right, or in a wave from side to side. Nothing about this is achieved by breath alone; it is a specific, trained muscular skill that happens to require the breath to be held out to make room for it.

This is why nauli sits after retention in this course rather than earlier, whatever order the raw clips arrive in. Attempting the abdominal isolation without first having real capacity to hold the breath out comfortably is attempting two hard skills at once, which is a reliable way to learn neither.

The traditional claim is digestive and abdominal: that the churning action massages the abdominal organs, stimulates digestive fire, and relieves constipation — which is what his own words above say too, in plainer terms ('cleanse', 'massage and activate'). There is a plausible mechanical story here — real, deliberate movement of the abdominal contents is not nothing — but this is observation-tier, the accumulated report of practitioners across a long tradition, not a claim with a modern clinical trial literature behind it. Held at that tier here, deliberately, rather than dressed up as more than it is.

His own guidance points at empty-stomach practice — "good to practice in the morning before breakfast" — consistent with the general contraindications below rather than adding to them.

Nauli is contraindicated, per general yoga-therapy guidance: during pregnancy and menstruation, after recent abdominal surgery, with hernia, peptic ulcer, uncontrolled high blood pressure, or any condition affecting the abdominal organs specifically. It also should not be attempted by anyone who has not first built real comfort with external retention — see l13's own cautions, which apply here in full and then some.

The contraindication list itself is still drafted conservatively from general guidance, not his own protocol, and awaits his clinical review before publication.

"We are going to practice now. The first step is abdomen lock. After deep exhalation, you hold your lungs get empty and you pull your abdominal muscles around the rib cage."

He teaches ten seconds of the lock to begin, after a deep exhalation: "you can practice longer, and longer practice will feel more aware of inside. And you will feel more energetic and cleansed." This is the technique commonly named uddiyana bandha elsewhere in the Hatha Yoga literature — he does not use that name in this clip, so it is given here only as a term a student may meet it under elsewhere, not as his own vocabulary.

The second step moves to standing: "you should stand up and bend your knees and a little bit bend forward, and place your hands on thighs to support your upper body. Then after deep exhalation your abdominal muscles be pulled around rib cage and you push your abdomen muscles forward." He teaches ten repetitions of the forward push, breath held out, per attempt.

The aim of this step is what he calls the 'elephant nose' — isolating and contracting only the central part of the abdominal muscles, elsewhere named madhyama nauli. "If you can do this, you can practice moving and rolling to side to side" — the lateral rolling nauli is named for is presented here as the next stage past this isolation, not the starting point. He closes with a direct instruction: "I encourage you to practice this daily basis. You will feel more energized and cleansed."

Both steps are built on retention with the lungs empty — the cautions l13 and l20 carry apply here in full: this is not a technique to attempt without first having real, comfortable capacity to hold the breath out. If you cannot currently do that without urgency or strain, that is this course telling you where to actually start, not this lesson.

"I practice Tibetan Buddhism as a Ngakpa. Ngakpa is an ordained Tibetan Buddhism priest." (See the About page's own record of this — Ngakpa ordination under Lama Glenn Mullin, December 2022.)

"In Tibetan Buddhism people practice Tsalung and Trulkhor. Tsa means energy channel. Lung means air, wind or energy, like prana. Trulkhor means magical movements. Both are Tibetan yogas including breath works, postures, movements, and visualization. People practice this to prepare Tummo eventually. Tummo is a practice including breath work, meditation for spiritual attainment."

"Actually, they are transmitted through lineages. So, I'm going to share my practice, which is a little bit modified Tibetan breath work."

He says this plainly, unprompted: what follows is his own modified version of a lineage practice, not the untouched transmission. That is not a lesser claim than teaching the tradition directly — Tsa Lung and Trul Khor are, by his own account, things a Ngakpa is qualified to practise and share — but it is a different one, and the site holds the distinction rather than smoothing it away. Reference points for the untouched lineage practice, for anyone who wants them, exist through teachers who trained inside it and later taught publicly: Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche's Tsa Lung teachings and Chögyal Namkhai Norbu's Yantra Yoga ('khrul 'khor) among the best known — offered here as external context, not as what this course itself teaches.

Structurally, this is also why it closes the course rather than opening it: it is not a new element so much as a synthesis of several this course already taught separately — breath, the retention l13 introduced, and now deliberate movement layered on top of both.

Every practice earlier in this course asks something of the breath alone. Trul khor asks the breath, a retained state, and coordinated physical movement simultaneously — which means the contraindications are not simply retention's contraindications repeated. Balance, joint health, and the physical capacity for the specific movements involved all become relevant in a way they were not for a seated practice. What exactly those movements are is in l23, the practice lesson that follows.

"We're going to practice a series of forceful breathing and retention. We're going to breathe through nose in and expand chest. Then drop tension to release out. So, we're going to do this 12 times. And after a 13th inhalation, we're going to hold for 30 seconds. After 30 seconds of holding, release. Gentle and smooth."

"How do you feel? You may feel dizzy, tingling sensations or vibrating. So your energy channels are being opened and activated. So with repeating this practice you'll be more energized and your energy channels more activated, and your energy capacity will be more expanded. I would encourage you to practice daily basis, and you will get more energy flow."

This is the base the next two stages build on: twelve forceful nose-in, chest-expanding breaths, then a thirteenth held for a stated thirty seconds before a gentle release — no belly movement yet.

"Okay, we are going to practice the other breath work. We practiced holding breathing in chest. In this practice, we're going to let it go down down to belly, and if you can, down to the lower belly, and we're going to roll your belly."

"So breathe in your chest. Your chest expanded, and let it go down. And you walk from top to bottom, bottom to top." He counts the round as "we are going to breathe 12 times for three, and you're going to hold, then let it go down to belly and roll" — quoted exactly, because the count is genuinely ambiguous on the recording and this is not the place to silently resolve it for him.

"This is very powerful breath work. Your energy capacity will be expanded, and you will be very energized, and your chakras and energy channels are opened and activated with this breath work."

"We are going to practice expansion breathing with tension and belly movement. You're going to breathe forcefully with chest. Breathe in through nose, breathe out through mouth — 12 times. After the 13th inhalation, you're going to hold. Let it go down and roll belly, then release gently."

"How do you feel? It might be difficult for the first time, but you will get used to it. I encourage you to practice further by yourself — consistency is a key. We'll achieve more energy capacity and more awareness. Take your time, and good luck for your practice."

His own stage-one clip is explicit that dizziness, tingling, and vibrating are the expected sensations of this practice working, not by themselves a reason to stop — read that as applying to all three stages, since two and three are built on stage one's same base. What still stops the practice is anything beyond that: faintness, real distress, or anything that does not settle once you release. All three stages combine chest-then-belly retention with deliberate movement, so l13's retention cautions and l22's movement cautions apply throughout, in full.