In a manner of speaking you have, naturally, been breathing all your life. But the chances are you haven't been breathing naturally for a long time.

With your good posture, stand in front of a mirror. Put one hand on your chest, and the other hand on the upper part of your abdomen.

Take a big, deep breath.

Did your chest swell up with that breath? Did you get small around the waist? If so, you need some reminders about correct, natural breathing.

We have in the lower part of the thorax, or chest cavity, a floor of muscle that is also the roof of the abdominal cavity, separating one from the other. This is the diaphragm.

Try an experiment by lying down on the floor. Just relax. Don't even think about your breathing. Place your hands flat against your floating ribs at the sidesand notice how the entire region, all the way around to the back, contracts and expands as you breathe, while your chest remains immobile. Notice, too, how the floating ribs now seem to have a very direct contact with the diaphragm.

Get a piece of string and make a lasso. Slip the lasso around the diaphragm region and, keeping the end of the string taut, notice how it lengthens and shortens as you breathe, while your chest remains immobile.

Stand up again and attach your chest, fixed and high, to your imaginary hook. Breathe just as you did while you were lying on the floor, again checking the expansion and contraction of your diaphragm with your lasso.

It may seem strange for you to breathe this way if you've been told most of your life to "take deep breaths with your chest." But don't be disturbed about it You are now following nature's way of breathing, and she'll help you acquire the habit of breathing in her own sensible manner. Nature is on your side.

All animals breathe in this fashion. You breathed in the same correct, natural way when you were an infant.

Here is a co-ordinating exercise in breathing and performing a specific action at the same time.

Exercise

Start from a sitting position with hands on knees. As you inhale, move one hand up to your top shirt button. Start the movement and a breath at the same instant. End the movement (at the top shirt button) at the exact peak of your intake of breath.

As you exhale, return the hand to its original position (on the knee). Arrive at this original position at the same instant the final expiration of your breath takes place.

By coordinating a movement exactly with your breathing, you have experienced the use of a potential power tool of acting. So keep practicing until you have mastered it

Focus your mind on diaphragmatic breathing and let your mind tell your body what to do. You'll soon get back to breathing as well as you did when you were born!

Nature intended that you should breathe with the diaphragm. It's healthful for your general well-being in daily living. And it's necessary to you as an actor. With diaphragmatic breathing, you control the breath and get compressed air, necessary for keeping balanced energy under all the vibrations of the speech instrument.

As you may know, compressed air is one of the strongest sources of power known to science. It's used to stop trains, to drive pneumatic drills, and in many other mechanical processes requiring enormous power.

To acquire vocal vitality and control, make use of the same kind of power that science has found so useful … Nature has already given you the necessary equipment.

Later, we'll go more extensively into the use of this source of power in speech. Meanwhile, breathe easily, rhythmically and diaphragmatically.

The following poem can be used as a muscular exercise to strengthen the muscles that control the diaphragm. Whisper the poem in a bass-baritone whisper—using no sound—with a high fixed chest (this means no movement of the chest).

This whispering exercise will help develop the habit of breathing from the diaphragm. It also develops control of the air as it leaves the lungs. Control of the breathing-out process is more important than control of the breathing-in process.

You may become dizzy when you first try the exercise, and you will feel that your diaphragm is pulling up inside the lung cage. That's good, just make sure that you don't stop the rich outflow of air by tightening your throat.

Exercise

No Movement of Upper Chest

THE CONGO *
Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room, Barrel-
house kings, with feet unstable, Sagged and
reeled and pounded on the table,
Pounded on the table,
Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom,
Hard as they were able,
Boom, boom, BOOM,
With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom,
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM.
Then I had religion, THEN I had a vision.
I could not turn from their revel in derision.
THEN I SAW THE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK,
CUTTING THROUGH THE JUNGLE WITH A GOLDEN TRACK.

Starting now, and in your daily practice of the exercise poem, whisper each line twice. Hold one hand on your chest, the other against your floating ribs. Keep your chest absolutely immobile no matter how difficult it may be at first.

Whispering strengthens the muscles in the region of the diaphragm and places the power of these muscles squarely under the column of breath. It also allows the small, delicate muscles of the throat to relax and builds up general muscle tone throughout the entire body system.

Florence Reed, noted for her magnetic voice and whose Shanghai Gesture became a landmark in theater history, once told me that before starting rehearsals in a new play she used to go up to her cabin in Maine and rehearse her entire role for one week IN A LOUD WHISPER.

Whispering will work wonders for you—and that's no secret!

* From Collected Poems by Vachel Lindsay, copyright 1933 by The Macmillan Company and used with their permission

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