Phil Jackson on Focused Breathing, Nature’s CO2 Trick, and Wisdom of Yoga

1. Don’t Let Your Breathing Get Featured to Death

“The answer starts with the noble intentions of engineers. Most technology and product design projects must combat feature creep, the tendency for things to become incrementally more complex until they no longer perform their original functions very well.”

- Chip and Dan Heath, Made To Stick

Breathing practices are simple. But, as humans, we tend to make things more complex. We let “feature creep” take over (guilty here). As Chip and Dan tell us, it’s an innocent process, but sooner or later, things get “featured to death.”

Feature creep can be seen in breathing in many ways—the infinite number of methods available, the untold number of bio-monitors you can wear, the countless places you can focus each breath.

These are all awesome things, and we should always be trying to improve our breathing. But, if your practice has lost its original function (relaxation, focus, etc.), then maybe it’s creeping too far.

Here’s to keeping our breathing fun and adding things that bring it more to life, not feature it to death.

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Related Quote: “The hardest thing in the world is to simplify your life because everything is pulling you to be more and more complex.” - Yvon Chouinard, Patagonia Founder

P.S. I find this to be more of an art than science with my practice. What’s “too much” for me might seem like “not enough” for you, so it’s very personalized.

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