How does breathing affect the sense organs?

[Phoenix3]

According to Daoist theory, Po is housed in the breath. And Po is responsible for the sense organs (eyes, ears, nose and mouth). But I can’t connect the two. Changing your breathing rate doesn’t affect your sense of smell, taste, etc.

[joeblast]

Sometimes the link is in a more subtle way - while regulating the breath doesnt change one's sense of smell (or....does it...later...) ....what the olfactory nerve does do, is act as an air-metering system in addition to detecting smells.  That is why its very important to learn the proper gut motions and combine it with not moving the air inside the airways, with the airways themselves.  The air metering links to heartrate and one's urge to actually breathe, and I've found that basically, the energy of all of the cranial nerves tend to do some measure of cascading over into each other.  Which is why it is so profound when the flow of air is smoothed beneath the threshold of detection, because then one can have that quiescence that's there momentarily during a breath hold, but keep it as a matter of ongoing course of meditation.   (=stopping the 40 cycles/sec resonance of the olfactory nerve and maintaining that....which, if one gets that far, is automatically calming the other sense nerves....that is actually a LOT of energy consumed each day for these processes, and stopping them for a couple hours a day really does cost-save a LOT of energy...and where gung winds up becoming a modulator for duration of breath able to be comfortably and sustainably achieved, longer breath, larger gung multiplier coefficient per breath....more gung, longer duration breath...)

 

Taste overlaps with salivation, and that's why the tongue is instructed to touch the nasopalatine nerve and make a head-mudra linking of the maxillary branch of the trigeminal nerve.  At the apex of the palette, its no longer the anterior branch of the nerve, though...

Edited January 11, 2018 by joeblast

[Small Fur]

On January 10, 2018 at 6:40 PM, Phoenix3 said:

According to Daoist theory, Po is housed in the breath. And Po is responsible for the sense organs (eyes, ears, nose and mouth). But I can’t connect the two. Changing your breathing rate doesn’t affect your sense of smell, taste, etc.

 

 

Strictly speaking, the sensory orifice directly associated with the Po is the nose (other sensory orifices are related to other spirit organs- i.e. ears to kidney, mouth to spleen, etc.,) , but because all networks are in relationship, the health of one spirit affects the health of its paired organ, and the quality of health in that elementally paired organ (each organ exists in groups of pairs or quads associated to an element) then affects all other organ pairs that it is in relationship.

 

So, if your breath is refined and its energy purified, then the essential energy of the spirit Po will be vitalized, thus nourishing your lung organ and every other organ thereafter. According to the Generating Cycle, the metal element that is the lung, is also mother to the kidneys and it will then nourish the water elements of the kidneys through this cycle. In addition, the Organ Clock network will convey this breath through chi flow of the channels via Exit and Entry Points in the meridian system.

 

And yes, rate of breath does affect your senses in that it can purify and fortify your senses, it can heighten or dampen your perception of conditions around you, as well as affect your state of mind and physiology. The fact that you aren’t aware of it in the moment or over a course of time, has to do with your sensitivity in awareness to those aspects of your body and its subtle bodies.  It is important to note that while the concrete sensory orifices will ultimately be affected at some point in the energetic process (hence resulting in physically concrete manifestations of health or illness), what the Daosists are referring to first and foremost are always movements of essences from which substances/ forms will arise.

 

So, a base example coming from a more Western model that can be more commonly perceived would be that if your lung is healthy then you will breath well, and if you breath is well then eventually your digestive processes will be improved thereby affecting your ability to distinctly appreciate both smell and flavor in the mouth. Here the mouth is not the lung, but the health of the lung that regulates breath, still effects the stomach which is integral to the digestive track that begins in the mouth. And certainly your breathing rate will affect your digestive processes and thus how you perceive odors.

 

The difference here is that Western medical systems have different correspondences and orientations, so this not a one-to-one example, but the basic principle remains the same; in order to understand more specifically what the Daoists were speaking of in terms of the body, studying the art and system of Chinese medicine may help make these correspondences more clear.

Edited January 31, 2018 by Small Fur