For 28 years I lived with chronic asthma.
I learned to manage attacks, to recognize the signs that anticipated an episode, to always have my inhaler with me.
What no one taught me was that these symptoms — breathing through the mouth, almost always having a stuffy nose — were not only related to my asthma and drained my vitality and well-being, but were also the door that later allowed recovery.
It was only much later that I realized that question had already been asked — and answered — by a Ukrainian doctor named Konstantin Buteyko.
The observation that changed everything
In the 1940s, Buteyko was still a medical student in Moscow. During one of his rounds with the most serious patients, he noticed something no one had named before: the sicker the patient, the faster and stronger their breathing.
Most saw this merely as a symptom — the body reacting to illness. Buteyko asked the reverse question: what if uncontrolled breathing was not just a consequence, but also a cause — and, when regulated, the very pathway to recovery?
This inversion led to decades of clinical work.
Today the method he created is used not only for asthma but also for anxiety, stress, and panic attacks — conditions where rapid, shallow breathing is not just the backdrop, but often the very driver fueling these conditions.
It also confirmed something I mention in my classes and consultations: a pattern only becomes chronic when there are chronic conditions sustaining it.
Symptom as a clue, not an enemy
There is something about this discovery that goes beyond asthma or any specific diagnosis.
We learn, almost reflexively, to treat symptoms as obstacles to eliminate. Fatigue, tension, shortness of breath, that tightness in the chest before a difficult meeting — all of these can become noise to silence as quickly as possible.
But the symptom can be a clue, not a mistake to blindly correct — a message about the state of the nervous system, about the way one is living. And, as Buteyko showed, it can also be the very path to reverse that situation.
In this case, through breathing regulation.
Listen instead of suppress
The question that remains is not “how do I make this symptom disappear,” but “what is this symptom pointing to?”
- It may be a lifestyle rhythm that no longer serves.
- It may be accumulated tension that never had space to be released.
- It may simply be months of breathing rapidly and shallowly without realizing it — anxiety and stress settling in through less functional breathing.
Listening is not passive. It is perhaps the first active step one can take.
And it can, in the case of symptoms that may be related to breathing, be taken here and now.
Breathing functionally.
A space for that deeper listening
Since November 2025, I have held several seminars on breathing. One thing repeats in almost all: at the end, someone asks if there is no way to explore this with more time — a weekend, they say, is not enough to integrate what begins to be felt.
It was that question, repeated session after session, that led to a retreat.
From October 14 to 20, with a small group in Gran Canaria — a maximum of twenty people — we will have six days to do exactly that: listen to the body through breathing, movement, and the rhythm of Autumn, the season that Traditional Chinese Medicine associates with the lungs, breathing, and the preparation and strengthening of the immune system for Winter.
This is not a retreat about advanced techniques. It is a space with enough time for what the seminars open up to finally settle.
See you next week.
Best practices
Lourenço de Azevedo