PREFACE to THE BREATHING CURE FOR YOGA: APPLY SCIENCE BEHIND ANCIENT WISDOM FOR HEALTH AND WELL-BEING by Patrick McKeown ANASTASIS TZANIS'' JOURNEY TO YOGA AND BREATH TRAINING My lifelong journey to better breathing began when I was 9 years old. Like many, I struggled with seasonal hay fever, insomnia, and difficulty concentrating, all symptoms associated with dysfunctional breathing. I vividly remember staying up late at night, awake in my bed, often with chest pain, performing breath holds to calm my racing mind and alleviate the pain! In the background, I could hear my parents and sister snoring loudly. Looking back, it is safe to say that breathing well didn''t come naturally to any of us. To help me with stress and with a secret hope of improving my concentration, my parents encouraged me to play sports. That was helpful, but my breath still often let me down. After running or sparring, I quickly ran out of breath, which obviously affected my performance. I remember trying--my hands on my knees, legs shaking, lungs hurting, mouth wide open--to catch a breath.

My understanding of the importance of the breath really crystallized when I was 12 years old as I was pushed by a boy and landed flat on my back. I fell so hard my diaphragm collapsed. Decades later, my memory of being unable to breathe is still crushingly vivid. Without much natural talent in concentration or physical skills but with a lot of stubbornness, I pushed through. By the age of 24, I was serving in the special forces as a paratrooper. One of the scariest moments of my military career occurred when my unit was due to run another military exercise. Without warning, when we heard the siren, we were to load everything on vehicles and resettle in a different location on red alert. The evacuation was to take no more than six hours.

As one would expect, the siren went off at the least convenient time--3 a.m. Minutes after, a young corporal got into a panic attack and began yelling at the top of his lungs. He was intimidating some new recruits who were unable to carry out their tasks. As his close friend, I tried unsuccessfully to help him relax and calm his breathing. Fortunately, before his behavior was noticed by the seniors, he lost his voice. After the military, I got my Masters in International Economics and Finance and began a career in finance, landing a currency derivatives trading job at a German investment bank in London. It was during my time in those highly competitive environments that I realized the cost that stress can have on the body! And stress always affects our breathing.

While the army was physically competitive, the bank was mentally competitive. In the army, I was deprived of mental stimulation. At the trading desk, my brain was taxed, but it was hard not to slip into a sedentary lifestyle. I was a junior at the trading desk trying to process as much work as possible--hoping I would keep my job for another week. The more senior members of the team were not particularly jolly either. Half the team had recently resigned and whoever was left was overworked, over-stressed, and probably questioning why they were there. In one of the rare moments when the trading floor was quiet, I heard a snoring noise. It was coming from a colleague sitting two to three meters away.

He was fully absorbed in his computer screens, red in the face and breathing as loudly as a galloping racing horse. Another colleague, next to him, claimed that this audible breathing was the norm from the moment he''d come in. Stress during my years in banking took its toll on my health and affected my weight and digestive system, but my journey into yoga really began in 2008 when laser eye surgery triggered a glandular fever. Instead of a week''s recovery, it took two months to get my eyesight back. My manager expected me to show up to work, but my vision was constantly blurry. I spent nine hours a day exhausted, staring at screens I couldn''t see, and my stress levels went through the roof. At the same time, the glandular fever stopped me from exercising, and I piled on the kilos. In my search for help, I adopted a fasting diet, dropped 13 kilos in three months, and got better mental clarity than ever before.

After that, I decided it was time to take my health seriously. So, at the age of 30, I began studying nutritional therapy and attending yoga classes. For the next three years, I immersed myself in yoga. In August 2011, I went to a yoga festival in Barcelona, which was hosting some famous teachers from the States. There, I discovered more about the non-physical aspects of yoga and how asana practice could impact all aspects of my life. I then traveled to California to learn from more teachers. By then, it was clear to me that people working in competitive environments like banking get older a lot sooner than yoga teachers do! My true path opened up to me when I was made redundant. At the time, it felt right to take a break from banking.

I never found the desire to go back. Instead, I felt called to share with others the benefits I had experienced. After traveling to Europe, USA, Canada, and Singapore to study with some of the best yoga instructors, I settled in London teaching yoga and offering nutritional consultations to individuals like myself. Despite my active teaching, I avoided cueing the breath during asana practice. My students often commented that, in contrast to their other teachers, I rarely spoke about the breath. I even refused to integrate ujjayi breathing into a beginner class I was giving. I just didn''t think I knew enough about it. I didn''t want to teach what I didn''t fully understand.

I knew that breathing was important in my practice, and I had learned that different pranayamas create different results, but pranayama was not covered in any real depth in my training. Since I was never told how these techniques worked, I didn''t pay much attention to them. When I didn''t find the answers on breathing in yoga, in 2015, I decided to study with a Dutchman known for his Guinness-awarded achievements in extreme environments. The Wim Hof Method was just becoming popular, opening my eyes to different breathing techniques. What I found was a new passion for Breath Training and a new depth to my yoga teaching. When a friend I''d met on a Wim Hof course came to London in 2017 to take the Oxygen Advantage® training with Patrick McKeown, I went along for the ride. By midday of the first day of Patrick''s workshop, I had learned more about breathing than I had in nine years of yoga practice. I began applying these new ideas in my yoga teaching, and the emails started to come in from my students.

Those who suffered with asthma would tell me that, if they had an attack and they didn''t have an inhaler to hand, they breathed the way I taught in class and would be able to stop the attack. Along the way, I discovered that different breathing methods work for different people. I worked with a 47-year-old man with an arrhythmia that compromises his respiratory capacity. The only thing that would reduce his heart rate during an episode of arrhythmia is slow breathing. A 94-year-old lady who has high blood pressure and asthma is only able to practice breath holds. These days, most of my work is with people in high-pressure jobs--lawyers and corporate high-flyers. Those who put effort into building their respiratory capacity report better concentration and a new ability to overcome panic attacks. They can confidently control their mental and physical state before public speaking and avoid performance nerves.

It''s never too late to begin. I didn''t practice yoga until I was 30 years old or breathwork until I was 37. The breath is incredibly powerful. Onc.