“CHANT WALKING CAN HELP YOU”

(Ended in 2018)

LEARN HOW TO PRACTICE Chant Walking that activates healthful deep breathing and natural body carriage and the psychological benefit of personal autosuggestion — all of which can be done at a pleasant pace in the hectic center of downtown Honolulu where today’s continuous traffic makes it easy to forget that all humanity walked everywhere until a few thousand years ago.

A SPECIAL ROUTE is followed through selected sites that create an inspirational environment with strong aesthetic accents which produce an immediate feeling of well-being. You’ll experience an alternating indoor/outdoor atmosphere that’s a refuge from what other areas of the city have become. The group enters six impressive architectural structures containing many imaginative artworks calling forth our appreciation of human creativity.

DISPLAYS OF WATER are seen along the way — confirmations of the basic fact that refreshing water is an essential element for civilization and life itself. All people throughout the world value water as fulfilling five important functions: (1) a necessity for every living thing, (2) a requisite for maintaining any society, (3) a cleansing agent, (4) a source of psychological regeneration, (5) use in religious rituals.

WE ARE DELIGHTED by the results of landscape designers and sculptors who introduce water as an animating motif in their public projects, with dynamic effects such as spouting and pulsing or cascading in stepped falls, also flowing calmly through channels bordered by tropical plants.

EVERYONE KNOWS how water brings joy into the play of children who are always fascinated by its shapeless, changeable nature. Paradoxically, water is both the weakest and most powerful of all elements. Scientists tell us it covers about seventy-five percent of our world, and the human body is sixty percent water.

And so this walking tour is not only The Clean Air Team’s invitation to learn about Chant Walking, but also a gentle reminder of everyone’s primary dependence upon our vital air and water supply which must be kept free of pollution.

SUGGESTED CHANTS FOR BEGINNERS

Always remember, fitness comes first.

The highway to health and wisdom is a footpath.

Wisdom is the art of living in accord with nature.

As long as the water mill keeps on working, it does not freeze.

Never be in a hurry — haste invites mistakes and accidents.

Good habits are guardians, bad habits are barriers.

Cultivate cheerfulness and keep smiling.

Let nuisances fade away.

Choose to be amused rather than angry.

It’s easy to be considerate.

I’m not a finished product.

ALICE FRASER, a volunteer worker of The Clean Air Team for many years, told how she chanted only two words, “Carry on …” during many long walks to cope with grief after the sudden death of her husband, Andy. So if an occasion arises in your life that’s a terrific impasse and you really don’t know what to do, just go Chant Walking, using any phrase temporarily as a starter until exactly the right wording for a helpful chant occurs to you.

Don’t be self-conscious about Chant Walking. There are plenty of people walking around jabbering into mobile phones. Simply write the lines of various chants on a 3x5 index card and hold it conspicuously, clasping your hands at your waist, with your thumbs together, pressing on the card. Glance down at it, now and then, as if you’re occupied with memorizing something, and nobody will think anything of it.

GO BEYOND THE CITY OFTEN — TO WHEREVER YOU CAN BREATHE REALLY CLEAN AIR!

DO YOU KNOW that we humans are “bio-electric” creatures? Without the presence of certain levels of electricity in the air around us — particularly in the form of negative ions — we can’t absorb the oxygen we must have to stay alive. The air we breathe can have two kinds of ion molecules, positive or negative in electrical charge, and one of these types will always predominate in the atmospheric conditions where we happen to be breathing at the moment.

The electrical charge of an ion molecule can switch back and forth between positive and negative as a result of their gaining or losing an electron in their atomic structure — a process occurring continually, according to the prevailing weather in the local environment. In dry spells when the ground contains little or no moisture, positive ions are generated. Today’s urban areas are encrusted with pavement saturated with high concentrations of positive ions. Huge amounts of them accumulate in and around buildings, vehicles and aircraft — where many people spend much of their time.

Everyone realizes our cityscapes are congested with traffic and clutter, but we’re relatively unaware of massive accumulations of positive ions trapped in the canyons of concrete and glass we’ve created. Modern technology is a major factor in the distortion of our oxygen’s natural electrical balance -­and this is a dangerous situation because positive ions are known to damage human health.

WANT TO FEEL BETTER?

WE THRIVE BEST by breathing negative ions that help us absorb beneficial oxygen which invigorates our body. Without sufficient oxygen we’ll fail to function properly. If our brain cells are deprived of it, we cease to be alert and our ability to reason fades rapidly. The surface of the earth itself always tends to be negatively charged. There are no positive ions within the air of places where the soil is moist, such as forests or near streams or waterfalls and large bodies of water. If a few positive ions happen to be present in droplets of moisture wafting into these areas, all of them are quickly absorbed, becoming beneficially negative. Thus moist atmospheres remain charged with negative ions — the ideal situation for humans as far as our air supply is concerned. You may not always notice, but you should immediately feel better where negative ions predominate. Breathing is especially vitalized and more exhilarating when we’re near moving water.

Scientific research indicates that while negative ions enhance our health — positive ions can make people sick. Dr. Albert Krueger, when a microbiologist and experimental pathologist at the University Of California, Berkeley, was the first person to discover that negative ions are beneficial for us because they kill airborne bacteria associated with common colds, flu and other respiratory problems. His fellow researchers also determined that negative ions produce a stimulating effect upon the specific kind of cells in our bodies which help us resist disease. A physician in Philadelphia demonstrated that when a machine generating negative ions was placed in the hospital rooms of patients suffering from severe burns, these people reported much less pain and recovered faster. There was less tissue infection and less scarring, too. Further experiments by Dr. Kreuger proved that an excess of positive ions in mammals causes an overproduction of serotonin that’s known as the stress hormone. And when too much of it is secreted into our bloodstream, it can create sudden changes in mood, anxiety, insomnia and migraine headaches. Persons who are acutely sensitive to dry winds have experienced an increase of the serotonin level in their blood at ONE THOUSAND PERCENT! On the contrary, negative ions are known to reduce serotonin in the midbrain, thus producing a tranquilizing effect. Certainly the kind of electricity in the air we breathe is important, and we should pursue the most advantageous atmospheric conditions available to us. If most of our time is confined to metropolitan Honolulu, we’ll need to visit other localities as often as we can, such as forested areas and shorelines and wide-open places, where we’re able to breathe deeply of the fresh air steadily brought to this archipelago by the Northeast Trade Winds which blow across the North Central Pacific Ocean, laden with negative ions.

LUNG COMPRESSION

OUR BREATHING IS AUTOMATIC but we can control it for short periods. When most people are asked to take a deep breath, their exaggerated chest expansion isn’t as necessary as they might think. If we want to obtain a greater supply of air than usual, it’s actually a little easier and much more efficient for us to do the opposite — concentrate on producing a stronger outflow of air.

Try this and you’ll discover that by compressing your lungs, inhalation will become effortless because when we exhale with additional force, emptying our lungs entirely, the earth’s atmospheric pressure of fifteen pounds per square inch will bring an adequate supply of air quickly back into the partial vacuum we created inside our compressed lungs. Absolutely no pull is required for us to obtain the rush of inflowing oxygen which naturally follows a consciously pushed outflow.

Breathing in this manner for short periods is one of the best things we can do because most of our energy is derived from oxygen rather than food consumption. Clean air vitalizes our blood and enhances our circulatory system’s ability to carry off the toxins within us. We know animals are instinctively aware of this. Dogs, horses, monkeys and other mammals have been observed resorting to compressed exhalation as an emergency response to life threatening situations. If a coyote eats poison bait, it immediately reacts with vigorous exhalation. It also knows that running and forcefully exhaling will cast out, through the lungs, any poison circulating in the blood. Whenever a bull forcefully blows air from his nostrils, he generates power that he seems to be able to feel and which he demonstrates by scratching a hoof on the ground. All bulls blow and scratch when they are agitated, and the harder they exhale, the stronger they get, due to the elimination of toxins through their lungs.

We humans, too, can perform lung compression under stressful conditions. The more oxygen we bring into our system during a crisis, the greater strength we will have available to face whatever comes. For better health in general and especially during athletic training — or if participating in a detoxification program — we can practice lung compression, forcefully exhaling to the limit and then holding our breath as long as possible before letting air to rush back into our lungs. This consciously controlled method of breathing will draw more fatiguing toxins from our bloodstream than regular respiration does.