For anyone interested in active solitude, we’ve devoted November to a deep dive on the breathing component. We’ve done lots of box breathing, alternate nostril breathing, and now we’re carefully wading into this other, more intense method called Tummo.
Tummo Instructions
Tim Van Der Vliet is terrific. In some of these videos you see his 5 year old son climbing around on his dad while he calmly explains a new way to breathe.
7 mins - short intro
5 rounds
More from Tim Van Der Vliet on youtube
James Nestor on Tummo
Lots of talk of Tummo as of late. Seems like a good time to close the circle... Adapted from BREATH (May 26, 2020) https://www.mrjamesnestor.com/breath
It turns out the first person to bring the superheating and superhealing power of Tummo breathing meditation, wasn't Maurice Daubard. It wasn't Wim Hof. It wasn't a man, but a woman, a Belgian-French anarchist and former opera singer who left Paris in her mid-40s to travel alone through India and Tibet in the early 1900s.
Her name was Alexandra David-Néel and she'd spent most of her life exploring different philosophies and religions. She was into Freemasonry and feminism and free love. But it was Buddhism that really fascinated her. David-Néel taught herself Sanskrit and a few meditations then set out on a spiritual pilgrimage that lasted 14 years.
Whenever David-Néel got hungry or cold or felt ill, she'd take a few Tummo breaths to rebalance her body and mind. She breathed herself through winters in the Himalayas as she hiked (according to her notes) for 19 hours a day in freezing temperatures without food or water at elevations above 18,000 feet. “[Tummo was] but a way devised by the Thibetan hermits of enabling themselves to live without endangering their health on the high hills,” she wrote.
Breathing didn't belong to one religion, culture, or guru, David-Néel argued. It belonged to everyone, everywhere; it was a technology within us all just waiting to be accessed.
When Alexandra David-Néel returned to Paris in the 1920s few doctors or medical researchers believed her stories. Few could accept that breathing alone could keep a body warm in freezing temperatures. Fewer believed it could control immune function and heal diseases.
Alexandra David-Néel ignored the critics, she kept doing things her way. She used Tummo and other ancient breathing and meditation practices until she died in 1969, at the age of 100.
I hope that each of you will do your own experiments, and move from being kite-fliers to horse-riders in your own way.