By Kevin Allision

Lung 101
Inhale, exhale, repeat.

Breathing is one of those things that, for most of us, should be about as simple as, well, breathing. Remember when Dylan sang, "It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe"? He called that song "Idiot Wind."

Last week, my better half arrived at the curious notion that my own respiratory skills left a lot to be desired. He noticed that I don’t do any of the sort of stretching, meditating and deep breathing that has made his own New York life a healthy one. Clearly, I needed to attend the Indonesian Breathing Workshop.

"It’s very unique! It’s not like just any other yoga or tai chi class," he said.

No sooner had my easy-breathing companion aired this plan than a spot in the class was reserved and paid for, and I wondered just how inadequate to feel about my in- and exhalation in general. I’d never heard of the Indonesian kind, and I’m not such a lefty turncoat as to poo-poo breathing American style.

"You can’t do anything wrong here!" said Sam Duffy to a room full of absolute beginners. A big, gentle, down-to-earth kind of guy, Sam’s the head instructor at One With Heart in Chelsea. He and his wife Karen, who is equally unaffected and fun, teach the breathing workshop there once a month. Sam and Karen look like the kind of people who brew beer or coach kids teams or rescue stray pups. That makes them something of an anomaly in their neck of the woods. Surrounded by the show-offs of gym culture in Chelsea, their martial arts school is unlike any other I’m aware of. There’s no attitude. Just a fondness for some of the simpler things in life. Beginning with breathing.

With hypnotic music playing, Karen warmed us up with some stretching. "Don’t worry, everyone looks like Elvis when they do this," she called out, hip-rotating. Then we learned a few different ways of inhaling and exhaling. One was quite soothing. Another was intense and made you sound like a helium dispenser. Sam warned us that when he was a kid he’d try to go too far with this particular method and start to black out. "That didn’t mean I was doing it well; that meant I was an idiot," he explained. Bob Dylan would be tickled at how far Sam has come.

Our friendly leaders then explained that the class was about to get more interesting. It did. At One With Heart, they practice an unusually beautiful form of martial art known as Poekoelan. It stems from ancient fighting forms of the Indonesians based on the body language of the tiger, monkey, snake and crane. Remember the Karate Kid saving the day while behaving like a rampaging flamingo? That’s the idea. I’ve seen people who’ve mastered Poekoelan move in the most exotic and explosive ways, some more Martha Graham, others more Discovery Channel, but all kickass. So we too were going to learn to behave like jungle creatures–only not when they’re breaking necks, just breathing.

The Indonesians also have something they call ilmu. Well, we all have it really–it’s life energy. Sam assured us that moving around the room as if we were stretching our crane wings and bobbing for fish underwater might feel awkward at first, but ilmu would kick in as a sort of automatic pilot provided we were breathing correctly. We were also to ignore the fact that we looked like folks having nervous breakdowns doing this. So the room filled up with arm swooping, toe touching, huffing, puffing and hissing. It’s all done slowly too, so it’s kind of like tai chi for the cast of The Lion King. After a few minutes, you feel both wired and relaxed. It clears the lungs, sparks the circulatory system, stretches and strengthens muscles and becomes a sort of sweaty, dreamy release. People become more comfortable in their own skin doing this sort of thing–and that’s a lot to be said for a class called "Breathing."

Karen is great with analogies. "Okay, now pretend like you’re the mixers in a mixing bowl… And now you’re trying to clap but your hands keep missing each other by a few feet!" she cheers us on. At times it all looks like a tribal hoedown in slo-mo.

Sam can also be charming with his shyness about stepping on anyone’s sensibilities. "Um…how can I put this delicately? See some of this stuff brings up phlegm balls for people, so feel free to run to the john if you gotta…"

The whole shebang was very nice for me because I never really got tai chi. In the parks in the morning it looks to me like people are training to become those silver painted guys who act like robots in the subway. But the swooping, slinking and squashing forms they do at One With Heart–not to mention all the lung action–would be beyond the Tin Man, and that’s why I got such a charge there. It’s more fun than yoga too, without people acting like they’re about to drink magic Kool-Aid and meet up with Halley’s Comet in the sky.

I’m not in the least bit coordinated and, in an ill-fitting shirt, just might pass for Earth’s first man with child. That kind of thing doesn’t matter one bit to Sam or Karen or anyone else at the workshop. Our teachers were happy with how quickly we were learning, and we were happy with how good it all felt. In the end, there were many flushed and smiling faces. And only one phlegm ball. That was mine. I didn’t know how to put it delicately.