REVERSE BREATHING, EMBRYONIC BREATHING, EARLY HEAVEN BREATHING, PRE-NATAL BREATHING, AND SO ON.
When you do the full Reverse Breathing, you pull the abdomen in slightly with the inhale (to constrain space and build up pressure) and you lift the perineum/anus area upward toward the Mingmen/lower-back. This action serves to pull inward and tauten the tissues all the way to the fingers and toes, once you've begun to develop those tissues from use. The inhale is an Open movement and it is pushed up the back.
When you exhale in reverse breathing, you let the pressure area in your lower-back drop forward with the stomach/belly dropping frontward and downward, and your tissue either relaxing or, if you're exerting force, contracting on the exhale. The exhale is a Closing movement and is part of the flow of tension/forces down the front of the body in the Microcosmic Orbit.
Over a period of time with this respiration maneuver, the abdomen area and the kidney area become quite strong. The constant manipulation of the abdominal area creates a strong nexus of muscles, just below and around the navel. The nexus of muscles is very odd-looking; the first time I saw it, I immediately thought of the movie Alien, in which a small monster bursts out of someone's chest.
Reverse breathing has to do with controlling and developing the tissues throughout the body, to the extremities, in order to supplement the body's normal strength. However, the Taoists took reverse-breathing, which may well have developed as an efficiency trick for agrarian labor (more on that in some other post), and developed tangential themes to the basic physical applications of reverse breathing.
I bought an old Stuart Alve Olson book of translated Chinese works about reverse breathing. It was interesting for me to speculate how the functional aspects of reverse breathing got mixed into the control of subconscious-mind/involuntary-muscle/fascia topics. The development of muscle nexus in the abdomen appears to have become associated with what Olson translated as a "spiritual embryo" that develops from a lot of reverse-breathing practice. Interesting stuff:
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Within the various types of Taoist meditation breathing, the two main regimes are Natural Breathing (自息, Zi Xi) and Embryonic Breathing (or Reverse Breathing). Embryonic Breathing is exactly how a fetus in the mother’s womb draws in blood, nutrients, and oxygen through the umbilical cord attached to the fetus’ navel and the mother’s placenta. The fetus draws in oxygen and nutrients by inhaling and contracting its abdomen. If the abdomen were expanded during inhalation it would cause a pushing back of the oxygen and blood into the placenta.
Taoist Internal Alchemy documents advocate this type of embryonic breath to likewise help develop and nourish the Spiritual Embryo with Jing and Qi,[12] a similar process of drawing in blood and oxygen. Natural breathing is how we start breathing after the umbilical cord is severed. In light of the Internal Alchemy metaphor of undergoing a spiritual pregnancy and creating a Spiritual Fetus (Tao Embryo) within the lower Elixir Field, imitating the breath of a human fetus during gestation is in many ways a psycho-spiritual means of bringing about a “total recall” of the birthing and creation experience.
Olson, Stuart. Embryonic Breathing: The Taoist Method of Opening the Dan Tian . Valley Spirit Arts.
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