Principle: Downward causation
The Door That Swings Both Ways
Chapter 12Breathing runs without you most of the time. You can also take it over. Follow the circle for one minute at about five and a half breaths a minute: in as it grows, out as it shrinks. Stop if you feel light-headed.
What you found
Breathing at about six breaths a minute raises vagally mediated heart-rate variability while you do it; the effect fades afterwards.
Breathing is the one vital rhythm run both automatically and by choice, which makes it a door between mind and body.
A decision in the mind changed a rhythm the body normally runs alone.
Further in the book
Chapter 12 asks whether attention to the breath can become a wider discipline of self-knowledge, and where the evidence for that stops.
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