In reality, it’s minutes of discomfort followed by more obstruction. My nose is such a mess that Nayak has to grab a pair of pliers and insert several inches of cotton swabs into each nostril to keep whatever is up there from spilling onto the floor. Then it’s back to the pulmonary function tests, an X-ray, the phlebotomist, and the rhinologist, repeating all the tests Olsson and I took before the obstruction phase. The results will be ready in a few weeks.
* * *
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It’s not until I get home that evening and rinse my sinuses several times that I can take a first full breath through my nose. I grab a coat and walk barefoot to the backyard. There are wispy plumes of cirrus clouds moving across the night sky, as big as spaceships. Above them, a few stubborn stars punch through the mist and cluster around a waxing moon.
I exhale stale air from my chest and take in a breath. I smell the sour, old-sock stink of mud. The black-label ChapStick of the damp doormat. A Lysol whiff of the lemon tree and the anise tinge of dying leaves.
Each of these scents, this material in the world, explodes in my head in a Technicolor burst. The scents are so sparkled and alarming that I can almost see them—a billion colored dots in a Seurat painting. As I take in another breath, I imagine all these molecules passing down my throat and into my lungs, pushing deeper into my bloodstream, where they provide fuel for thoughts and the sensations that made them.
Smell is life’s oldest sense. Standing here alone, nostrils flaring, it occurs to me that breathing is so much more than just getting air into our bodies. It’s the most intimate connection to our surroundings.
Everything you or I or any other breathing thing has ever put in its mouth, or in its nose, or soaked in through its skin, is hand-me-down space dust that’s been around for 13.8 billion years. This wayward matter has been split apart by sunlight, spread throughout the universe, and come back together again. To breathe is to absorb ourselves in what surrounds us, to take in little bits of life, understand them, and give pieces of ourselves back out. Respiration is, at its core, reciprocation.
Respiration, I’m hoping, can also lead to restoration. Starting today, I will attempt to heal whatever damage has been done to my body over the past ten days of mouthbreathing and try to ensure ongoing health in the future. I’ll put into practice several thousand years of teachings from several dozen pulmonauts, breaking down their methods and measuring the effects. Working with Olsson, I’ll explore techniques to expand the lungs, develop the diaphragm, flood the body with oxygen, hack the autonomic nervous system, stimulate immune response, and reset chemoreceptors in the brain.
The first step is the recovery phase I’ve just done. To breathe through my nose, all day and all night.
The nose is crucial because it clears air, heats it, and moistens it for easier absorption. Most of us know this. But what so many people never consider is the nose’s unexpected role in problems like erectile dysfunction. Or how it can trigger a cavalcade of hormones and chemicals that lower blood pressure and ease digestion. How it responds to the stages of a woman’s menstrual cycle. How it regulates our heart rate, opens the vessels in our toes, and stores memories. How the density of your nasal hairs helps determine whether you’ll suffer from asthma.
Few of us ever consider how the nostrils of every living person pulse to their own rhythm, opening and closing like a flower in response to our moods, mental states, and perhaps even the sun and the moon.
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• • •
Thirteen hundred years ago, an ancient Tantric text, the Shiva Swarodaya, described how one nostril will open to let breath in as the other will softly close throughout the day. Some days, the right nostril yawns awake to greet the sun; other days, the left awakens to the fullness of the moon. According to the text, these rhythms are the same throughout every month and they’re shared by all humanity. It’s a method our bodies use to stay balanced and grounded to the rhythms of the cosmos, and each other.
In 2004, an Indian surgeon named Dr. Ananda Balayogi Bhavanani attempted to scientifically test the Shiva Swarodaya patterns on an international group of subjects. Over the course of a month, he found that when the influence of the sun and moon on the Earth was at its strongest—during a full or new moon—the students consistently shared the Shiva Swarodaya pattern.
Bhavanani admitted the data were anecdotal and much more research would be needed to prove that all humans shared in this pattern. Still, scientists have known for more than a century that the nostrils do pulse to their own beat, that they do open and close like flowers throughout the day and night.
The phenomenon, called nasal cycles, was first described in 1895 by a German physician named Richard Kayser. He noticed that the tissue lining one nostril of his patients seemed to quickly congest and close while the other would mysteriously open. Then, after about 30 minutes to 4 hours, the nostrils switched, or “cycled.” The shifting appeared to be influenced less by the moon’s mysterious pull and more by sexual urges.
The interior of the nose, it turned out, is blanketed with erectile tissue, the same flesh that covers the penis, clitoris, and nipples. Noses get erections. Within seconds, they too can engorge with blood and become large and stiff. This happens because the nose is more intimately connected to the genitals than any other organ; when one gets aroused, the other responds. The mere thought of sex for some people causes such severe bouts of nasal erections that they’ll have trouble breathing and will start to sneeze uncontrollably, an inconvenient condition called “honeymoon rhinitis.” As sexual stimulation weakens and erectile tissue becomes flaccid, the nose will, too.
After Kayser’s discovery, decades passed and nobody offered a good reason for why the human nose was lined with erectile tissue, or why the nostrils cycled. There were many theories: some believed this switching provoked the body to flip over from side to side while sleeping to prevent bedsores. (Breathing is easier through the nostril opposite the pillow.) Others thought the cycling helped protect the nose from respiratory infection and allergies, while still others argued that alternate airflow allows us to smell odors more efficiently.
What researchers eventually managed to confirm was that nasal erectile tissue mirrored states of health. It would become inflamed during sickness or other states of imbalance. If the nose became infected, the nasal cycle became more pronounced and switched back and forth quickly. The right and left nasal cavities also worked like an HVAC system, controlling temperature and blood pressure and feeding the brain chemicals to alter our moods, emotions, and sleep states.
The right nostril is a gas pedal. When you’re inhaling primarily through this channel, circulation speeds up, your body gets hotter, and cortisol levels, blood pressure, and heart rate all increase. This happens because breathing through the right side of the nose activates the sympathetic nervous system, the “fight or flight” mechanism that puts the body in a more elevated state of alertness and readiness. Breathing through the right nostril will also feed more blood to the opposite hemisphere of the brain, specifically to the prefrontal cortex, which has been associated with logical decisions, language, and computing.