Common Buteyko Practitioner Mistakes

Part 1. of many in a long series - Buteyko Lite.

Stalmatski

When I met my teacher I was a businessman and if anything had an absolute aversion to even the notion of being a teacher, practitioner, healer, therapist, counsellor or any such occupation. I was only interested in deals, running businesses and to the extent it was humanly possible, to make as much money and have as much enjoyment as possible. You could say my philosophy was simple and consistent with the prevailing dominant mentality of the 1980’s.

When I came across the Buteyko Method (which it wasn’t called then) I looked at it as a marketing problem to be solved, an important treatment for various chronic diseases, that had to be popularised in order for it to become a viable and profitable business that it deserved to be.

This turned out to be more difficult (and complicated) than I anticipated. And after 35 years it still is, except I’ve realised that authentic Buteyko challenges are in fact a pale reflection of the vast capacity and exceptional usefulness of Professor KP Buteyko’s extraordinary discoveries and techniques.

I had the extraordinary good fortune to meet Alexander Sergeevich Stalmatski, who was Professor Buteyko’s official protege. I saw the results he produced in front of my eyes. He made teaching Buteyko look deceptively easy, the same way Tiger Woods makes golf look easy. Stalmatski was not a businessman and we had little in common. I think he put up with me for over ten years because I supported the method and acted as his assistant. In return I learnt how he was able to do what he did.

Practitioner Training

After being involved with Stalmatski in the training of a few dozen Buteyko Practitioners, including the first generation of Practitioners trained outside of Russia, it is my opinion that amongst the first common mistakes of contemporary Buteyko Practitioners occurs in their relationship with students.

Too much emphasis is placed on professional and commercial incidentals and the accommodation of student sensibilities and cultural norms, which come at the expense of the essence and gravity of the training. Learning Buteyko and adopting Buteyko is a deep dive into a realm in which you learn how to exert influence over the most powerful mechanisms in the human mind and body. Its not like learning a recipe for the perfect sponge cake or mastering the guitar rift of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven.     

Just as Yoga can be much more than stretching exercises for bored housewives, authentic Buteyko is much more than a social collaboration in which some interesting health information, breathing exercises and pleasantries are exchanged for money. It is in my opinion the only way to authentically exert a meaningful influence over the mind/body mechanism to reverse a diverse and miserable array of the most common health and mental disorders that are currently mistreated and are a a plague on humanity.

Be nice…

Unlike many other therapies and treatments, the role of the student is active and not passive - you can’t breathe or breath hold for someone else. The student must work and often work quite hard, in addition to applying numerous and often counter intuitive life style changes and changes of habit. The learning for curve for adults is steep and its application even steeper - particularly for those who are in poor health. Nevertheless, practicing Buteyko is easy if you are devoted, verging on the fanatical and have a good teacher - and virtually impossible otherwise. Children have it much easier for a whole range of reasons that I will leave for another conversation.

Stalmatski’s demeanour towards students was not particularly charming - he was not there to be your friend or be interested in your ideas, he was there to deliver very important information and instructions that will enable you reverse debilitating illness’s and the reason behind them.

There would be no unnecessary ceremony, protocols or polite chit chat - unless of course students did good solid work, then an approving nod or a restrained smile might slip out.

There would be no default  “bonding” with students. That would be strictly reserved for those who worked hard and who really needed it, due to their difficult circumstances and or the challenges which confronted them.

Stalmatski’s approach was the reverse of the Western mainstream / commercial / customer is king / contemporary therapist / teacher approach, in which “bonding” with students is generally emphasised. He had no time for anything, but strenuously persuading students to follow Buteyko’s advice and practice as diligently as possible.

This is not the way we normally work

For some years Stalmatski’s approach grated on me and seemed counterintuitive. Being friendly and getting along with people seemed a part of our culture. After all they are customers, we should be as accommodating as possible. Surely?

After working within some of the largest alternative clinics and prestigious medical outfits in the world, the penny finally dropped. Bonding with patients is actually essential for many therapists because after the patient has spent a small fortune and gotten very little out of the whole exercise, the therapist is much safer if they are on good terms through friendship with their patients. There is less chance of unpleasantness at the end of it.

Furthermore for many patients, reversing their chronic health issues by normalising their breathing is a hugely challenging job. There will be cleansing reactions, periods in which nothing seems to be happening, mental issues and strong aversions to a practice, which can be tedious and unwanted. And on top of this, one must assimilate a whole range of ideas which are counterintuitive and fly in the face of common opinion.

If it is the case a Practitioner is focused on keeping their students happy and comfortable throughout the whole process, one is naturally tempted to steer away from the essential work to be addressed  and concentrate on the more palatable aspects of the sessions, indulging in all manner of very welcome and highly appreciated distractions.

Student Management    

If you’ve got students moaning and complaining about cleansing reactions, it threatens to kill the vibe of the sessions. So many, so called Buteyko Practitioners avoid the rigour of practice which induces these essential reactions because it might spoil the atmosphere of the workshop. The problem is, that these “cleansing reactions” for example, are essential and without them, progress will be decapitated.

Real Training

The sad fact is that perhaps most teachers who claim to teach Buteyko have not themselves mastered it and are as personally unfamiliar with cleaning reactions as their students. The same can be said of changing habits, which may require a good deal of serious persuading and explanation to implement. I know this is the case because most people take many months of solid practice to achieve serious results and yet there are Buteyko Practitioner Courses which are conducted over a few weeks and you even get a certificate. When under the auspices of KP Buteyko, one could not train as a Practitioner unless you had at least doubled, if not tripled your CP and then it took around 7 years and experience with thousands of cases before you could work independently and be accredited.

Managing the challenging issues around Buteyko is where Stalmatski distinguished himself. He was actually a very ill man who suffered complications from some deep genetic predispositions and Buteyko saved his life on many occasions and unlike most Practitioners, he was intimately familiar with the dark shadows and miserable twist and turns of being very ill and what it took to wriggle and squeeze out of the vice like grip of serious illness.

I still remember numerous very ill people that practiced hard and came to see Stalmatski. I remember one in particular, but one of many that presented her horrendous situation in graphic detail. She looked incredibly frail and like death. Stalmatski sat with her quietly and said nothing for a long time. Eventually he whispered, “I know, keep going”. It wouldn’t be for some months until I saw her again, with her glassy sparkling eyes, rosy cheeks and bubbling with effervescence. She greeted Stalmatski with an ear to ear grin and he briefly giggled under his breath.

Professor Buteyko said that Practitioners have “their own handwriting”, their own style and the idea is not to be a clone of Stalmatski but instead to realise a strategy to lead students through from one side of health to the other.

Getting back to the subject of Common mistakes Buteyko Practitioners make and one being, an all too common improper relationship with students, it occurs to me that it arises mostly because of a lack of experience and familiarity with authentic practice and the actual way in which results are achieved.

On the whole it’s a bitter irony, because I don’t believe that even the most wooden, disconnected, inexperienced and useless Buteyko Practitioner entered the field with a view to do harm. To the contrary, I’m firmly convinced that virtually all had the very best of intentions to be helpful and to be of benefit to others. Nevertheless, I feel obliged out of respect to my teacher, Alexander Stalmatski and to those who seek a way out of their chronic misery, to draw attention to the situation as it is.

Warm regards,

Christopher

P.S If you want see Alexander Stalmatski in action - here he is.