What if I told you there’s an elevator inside your body that you ride roughly 20,000 times a day, but most of us have no idea how it actually works?
In Part 2 of our anatomy series, we’re going inside the anatomy of your breath. You’ll meet the giant jellyfish-shaped muscle underneath your lungs, the trampoline at the bottom of your pelvis, the expandable walls surrounding them, and the tiny tourists trying to get the full tour of your torso.
Because breathing isn’t just about your lungs. Every breath is a coordinated movement between your diaphragm, ribs, abdominal muscles, pelvic floor, and nervous system.
In this episode:
🔹 What your diaphragm is actually doing when you inhale and why it moves in the opposite direction most people assume
🔹 How your diaphragm and pelvic floor work together and why constantly gripping your belly or pelvic floor can interfere with that relationship
🔹 What 360-degree breathing really means and how your ribs, belly, back body, and pelvic floor accommodate every breath
🔹 Why shallow breathing recruits your neck and shoulders and can keep your nervous system’s “fire alarm” switched on
Your breath isn’t simply moving air. So this week, notice your elevator. Is it getting the full ride or are you spending all day in the penthouse?
✅ If you’re loving this level of detail, this is exactly how we teach inside my 200-Hour Yoga Teacher Training. Join us for the next cohort → https://www.brettlarkin.com/online-yoga-teacher-training/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=podcast&utm_campaign=200ytt
FREE Practice: 20 Min Deep Breathing Yoga Flow – Day 4
Relevant Blog: Pelvic Floor Trauma vs Tightness: Why So Many Women Get Misdiagnosed
Relevant to Today’s Episode:
✅ 200-hour Online Yoga Teacher Training
🎧 Also Listen to:
#366 – Is Trauma Actually In Your Hips? The Impact of Stress on Hip & Pelvic Health with Dr. Brianne Grogan
#444 – Spine Anatomy: Do You Understand the System Holding Your Practice Together?
© 2026 Uplifted Yoga | BrettLarkin.com
Transcript:
Brett Larkin:
if I told you there’s an elevator inside your body that you ride roughly 20,000 times a day, but most of us have no idea how it actually works. Today we’re going inside the anatomy of your breath.
We’re going to meet the giant jellyfish-shaped muscle hiding underneath your lungs, the trampoline at the bottom of your pelvis, the expandable walls surrounding them,
and the Taurus who are desperately trying to get the full tour of your torso.
Breathing isn’t just about your lungs. Every breath is an incredible coordinated movement between your diaphragm, your ribs, your abdominal muscles, your pelvic floor, and nervous system. And when that coordination breaks down, your elevator gets stuck. Other muscles start coming online.
It’s like you’re taking the stairs instead of an elevator and eventually your body’s fire alarm starts going off. So whether you’re a yoga teacher who wants to understand the anatomy behind so many of our breathing cues and have a deeper understanding, or you’re someone who just simply wants to breathe better in your own body, by the end of this episode, you’ll never think about an inhale.
again in the same way. Let’s get started.
anatomy diaphragm (02:17)
My dentist once told me something that completely changed my life and it was that I needed to floss more. Okay, that’s not life-changing. But what she actually said is that you need to floss more than you need to brush your teeth. So she basically said to me, if you had to choose between brushing and flossing for your gums, for your teeth, for your situation, floss.
I talk about this moment in my book Yoga Life. I think about it all the time because ever since she put it that way, I’ve flossed every day ever since. When she literally said, like listen, if you have to choose between brushing and flossing, you should floss.
When you think about taking care of your teeth, you assume the most important thing to do is brush.
But actually, and maybe if you’re a dental professional, you can also let me know,
But flossing is actually the secret that matters the most. And honestly, I think yoga has this exact same problem. Everyone thinks yoga equals poses. They think yoga is about flexibility and handstands and leggings and Instagram. But here’s the thing: yoga is actually about the breath. So if you had to choose between doing poses and really focusing on your breath development, I would say choose breath.
breathing and this lines up exactly with how ancient yoga was always taught, what it focused on. In ancient yoga, pranayama came first. Yoga was part of a set of meditative practices designed for people who were trying to reach enlightenment. All the poses and movements got added later. In fact, my history of yoga course We actually do a timeline in that course from the very first cave painting of someone doing yoga. And guess what? He was sitting, meaning he was breathing.
and we see that all the poses when we go through that course, the poses got added much, much later. Movement came later.
But poses without awareness of the breath isn’t really yoga.
So modern yoga latched onto the poses and the physicality and the shapes and the athleticism and how it looks from the outside.
But all of those beautiful poses and movements without awareness of the breath isn’t really yoga.
So just like flossing is the underrated, overlooked secret to an amazing smile and great teeth, really developing your breath and your breathing is the powerful driver that’s going to make your yoga practice transformational.
But here’s what’s funny: even people who know that breathing is important don’t actually know what’s happening when they breathe. And we break it down in online yoga teacher training. Many of you might have done 200-hour, 300-hour kundalini with me. We talk about the breath. But it’s so important. I wanted to devote this entire episode to just reviewing the anatomy.
In a way that is super fun, super accessible, and ideally in like a funny way, in a way that you’ll actually remember.
Because achieving some yoga pose isn’t gonna change your life, but changing and developing your breath, so you’re breathing with anatomical efficiency in a way that’s soothing for your nervous system, like that is going to change your life. So first I invite you, wherever you’re listening to this podcast, just tune in. Don’t change your breath, just notice it. And I’m gonna ask you a series of questions.
So don’t change anything, but just observe, no judgment, we’re just taking inventory. So as you’re driving or walking or whatever you’re doing right now, are you breathing in with your nose or your mouth? Does the air coming into your nostrils feel dry or moist? Do you sense yourself breathing more with your chest?
Do you feel more movement in your chest or your belly or your back ribs as you breathe?
Simply observe if you’re breathing fast or slow.
Now here’s the fun part. Did you notice that simply paying attention to your breath with me just now already changed your breathing?
Again, I talk about this in the sit chapter. It’s chapter four in my book, Yoga Life.
When you bring your awareness to your breath without even consciously trying to change it, it shifts. And if you’re busy like me, this is actually the best possible news because when I think about my laundry, my laundry situation doesn’t improve, nothing gets folded, nothing gets washed. I’m just thinking about laundry. But when you think about your breath, it actually changes. It usually slows down. Like if I think about money in my bank account right now,
Nothing improves. I don’t earn more money. money doesn’t go away either, but I’m just thinking. But when I think about my breath, I actually begin to receive the benefits, anatomical benefits, nervous system benefits right away. There’s really nothing else that I can think of. I don’t know about you, that simply by thinking about the thing, you receive tons and tons of benefits.
The fun we’re gonna have in this episode is that we’re going to imagine your torso as a very, very unusual building, not a concrete skyscraper.
But a building that is alive, with walls that move, with a floor that bounces, and it’s this magical building that changes shape every few seconds.
Three years ago, I got to visit one of my very best friends in Paris. She lives there now, she’s half Parisian. But one of the first things that happened when I arrived to this beautiful old building that she lived in, is she said, Hi, welcome, and I’m coming in with my roller bag. she said, How afraid are you of being stuck in an elevator? That’s an unusual opening question. Like, hi, welcome to my house.
How afraid are you of being stuck in an elevator? And the the how was the really interesting part for me of that question, because it’s like, I mean, obviously I don’t want to be stuck in an elevator. That’s not my preference. But like, how afraid? And she went on to explain that her building, like many buildings in Paris, is very old and the elevator system is very, very old. So she only recommended really using it when I had to bring my luggage up or if I had really heavy bags.
And she said that it breaks down often, and so that you can be stuck in it. But then the repairmen usually come, and of course, I basically was like freaking out. So, what does this have to do with what we’re talking about today? Well, this building that we’re gonna be exploring today, in your body, it is not like this Parisian concrete building where the elevator gets jammed and stuck. Are movable
Dynamic.
Building, I want you to visualize that right in the middle of it is an elevator, but not the creaky stops all the time, breaks all the time, crazy French Parisian style.
Kind.
This is an elevator that is so graceful, so slick, so
Fluid.
But we have to learn how to work with it. We have to learn how to turn it on. We have to learn how this elevator can take a full journey down the body and back up the body.
So if you can put your hands on your lower ribs right now, feel your lower ribs. And maybe you can only just do one hand if you’re driving, that’s okay, but just feel your lower ribs and notice as you’re breathing, like, do they move? So as you take a deep breath in, do your ribs move at all? Or are they kind of static? And again, no judgment, but most of us will realize, like, you know, my ribs aren’t moving that much. And don’t panic because we’re about to wake up the building.
So let’s meet our first character in this story.
It is your diaphragm. And to think about your diaphragm, I want you to imagine a jellyfish. Not a teeny tiny aquarium jellyfish, not the like creepy white ones that can sting you in the ocean. I want you to think like huge, like either aquamarine or orange, like a huge, graceful jellyfish that is awe inspiring, that is floating. And what’s amazing is that’s
actually remarkably close to what your diaphragm looks like. So your diaphragm is like this gorgeous, gorgeous jellyfish snuggled up under your ribs right here. It’s a beautiful dome and then it’s attached around the lower ribs and it actually is also attached into the lumbar spine.
And this glittering, gorgeous creature performs thousands of repetitions, going down and up, down and up, down and up. We’ll look at that in a moment, every single day. In fact, if it stopped doing that, you would be dead. And yet we never acknowledge our diaphragm, we never think it, we never go to the gym. People spend so much time on like their biceps and their quads and using all these machines. But no one thinks about this. This is a muscle. The diaphragm is a muscle. And unfortunately, when it comes to breathing,
Everyone seems to give the lungs credit. Like a lot of people think it’s like your lungs that are breathing. That is not true. Another way you can think about this diaphragm is like a drummer in a band. It is keeping everything else in sync, but nobody notices it until until it stops and then nothing else can function.
So our elevator is actually like this jellyfish. And here’s what’s crazy: is when we inhale, the jellyfish that’s snuggled, it’s domed up under your ribcage. When you breathe in, this muscle of your jellyfish diaphragm contracts, meaning it moves down. Now, this is incredibly unfair because everyone assumes that when you breathe in, your diaphragm moves up, or that when you contract, you know, like most many muscles, it moves up or towards.
Towards you, but it doesn’t. When you breathe in, your jellyfish diaphragm that’s snuggled up under your ribcage contracts downward, downward towards your pelvis.
And so let’s explore again. Maybe just take, if you can, one hand on on your ribs and one hand on your belly. And take one breath and think about what moved first. What moved first? Your ribs, your belly, maybe nothing moved.
What we want is that when we breathe in and the diaphragm contracts and moves down, the belly is actually gonna puff up slightly. So the ribs are gonna expand a little bit. These ribs are like movable walls. They’re gonna expand a little bit to make room for jellyfish to contract down. And then you want your belly to actually puff up a tiny bit, puff out, outward in front of you.
Now, this is not because air is entering your belly. This is a gentle response, but it’s because your diaphragm is actually moving and compressing all the organs down here. And those organs need somewhere to go. So they move out a little bit slightly. So your belly isn’t filling with air, it’s politely making room for your organs that are being compressed down by your diaphragm, your jellyfish contracting.
So as your diaphragm moves down, where does it go? Well, it compresses some organs, so that’s why your belly puffs out a bit, but it doesn’t crash onto a concrete floor. That’s not what happens. It actually lands on a beautiful hammock, a sling. And that’s where we’re gonna meet here, our pelvic floor at the bottom of our pelvis. So your pelvic floor, you can think of it like a hammock or a sling that’s supporting your bladder, your bowels.
your reproductive organs.
So actually the basement of this building of your torso is like a trampoline.
So visualize with me now. You can do this standing, driving, wherever. Think about your sit bones. Those are the two bony knobs back here, right? I want you to think about your sitting bones. So that’s what you’re sitting on, or if you’re walking, they should be directly over your heels. And imagine a trampoline. I want you to take an inhale and an exhale.
When the diaphragm lowers, the trampoline that’s between your legs is going to, it’s between your two sitting bones and your pubic bone in the front, okay? It’s going to gently give, it’s gonna gently yield and go down. And when the diaphragm rises, the trampoline is gonna gently rebound up.
Now a trampoline that no one is allowed to bounce on isn’t that much fun. So
Kegels are very popular. So some people spend a lot of time doing Kegels and they’re like, right, they’re sucking the pelvic floor up, up, up, up, up. But then your diaphragm doesn’t have this like juicy, responsive trampoline floor to to land on.
So remember, a healthy muscle is supposed to be able to contract and relax.
So when your diaphragm contracts, meaning it moves down, the jellyfish flattens, it moves down, it squishes your organs, it pops the belly out, your pelvic floor actually is releasing, right? It’s moving down towards the floor as well. So these
Beautiful plungers of the body are actually completely synced, but they’re doing the opposite muscular movement. When you exhale, the pelvic floor is actually going to contract and come back up, and the diaphragm is going to release. The diaphragm muscle already contracted, so now it’s releasing and coming back. So it’s they’re gonna go down together and up together in this beautiful synchronized motion. Down together as you breathe in, up together as you breathe out.
If your pelvic floor is in a chronic kegel, like let’s make it a fist, that harmonious movement is not going to work so well.
So we have our jellyfish elevator, we have a trampoline, but something else has to happen for our magic building, our torso to expand. The walls, the walls. So again, put your hands around your lower ribs, your sides, inhale, and see if you see your your ribs or can feel your ribs moving sideways, aka left to right. Honestly, most of us will barely feel anything. But
Your lower ribs are not rigid bones. If you look at Skelly here, you’ll see your upper ribs actually connect on your sternum. But your lower ribs, they’re often called false or floating ribs, aren’t rigid bones. They’re not connected to the sternum. AKA, they’re designed to move like these magic walls of a building.
They’re supposed to open to allow this three hundred and sixty degree expansion of jellyfish moving down.
So we want to feel some subtle rib movement. Your ribs are not decorative molding on this building of your torso. They didn’t sign a lease agreement to stay perfectly still. And remember, your torso is not a concrete bunker or a super old rusty French buildings elevator. We are in an inflatable building, kind of like one of those inflatable bounce houses, but subtler and more elegant. So as the elevator
Of your diaphragm lowers, the walls expand a little bit on the sides, on the front, on the back. So see if you can feel that a little bit now as you’re breathing, as you breathe in. I want you to visualize your jellyfish, your diaphragm flattening, moving down. You should feel your ribs expanding left to right, front and back, and your belly puffing out a little bit. And then as you exhale, you draw your navel to your spine.
Your ribs hug in, helping your jellyfish snuggle back up under your rib cage. So a full breath isn’t like one balloon filling and deflating, it’s an entire building, like a symphony expanding from the inside out. So now that we’ve learned about the players, the jellyfish elevator of your diaphragm, the trampoline of your pelvic floor.
The expandable walls of your intercostal muscles in in your ribs. we haven’t actually like ridden this elevator yet. And don’t worry, you don’t have to stress about getting trapped inside.
So now let’s ride one single breath together. So imagine wherever you are that you’re a teeny tiny oxygen molecule. Okay, I know this sounds ridiculous, but just go with me. And we’re gonna imagine your teeny tiny oxygen molecule as a tourist. Okay, it’s a tourist that like wants to see your building. It wants to see the whole building. You know how people get tickets to tour a building, they wanna go up and down.
Like Empire State Building or whatever, they want to get all the views, they want to see all the dimensions. We want to give this little oxygen molecule a beautiful tour of your torso, of your building. Imagine they’ve traveled from very, very far away, and these tickets were expensive. They want the full tour. So touch, touch your nose just to draw awareness, or you can just breathe into your nose. And as you breathe in,
Just some questions. There’s no right or wrong here, but can you feel or sense your left nostril, your right nostril? Usually one nostril is gonna be dominant and feel a little more open. So just notice which for that, which is that for you right now? For me, it’s my right. When you breathe in through your nose, does it feel cool or does it feel warm?
In yoga, I often get asked, why do we breathe in through the nose? Well, your nose has these hairs in it, and these are called cilia, and they’re great filters. They’re like a filter. I mean, it would be weird if you like breathed in a bug or a mosquito. That would be gross. We have filters built into our nose through these little hairs, and those hairs also serve to warm and humidify the air. So this is why yogis emphasized breathing through the nose.
So the tourists step inside. So think of the nose as like your lobby. It’s like the lobby to the building. Like maybe they’re getting their tickets checked. Okay. But they don’t want to just see the lobby. They want to go on the tour of your building. So now the jellyfish is going to get to work. Your diaphragm. So your little oxygen molecule is here. They are going to ride and get pulled down, right? Like a plunger. So your jellyfish is snuggled up under your ribcage in a dome.
shape as you breathe in the diaphragm contracts. It’s working. It’s moving down. And as it plunges down and flattens out, that’s what makes your lungs expand like a vacuum and the air from your nose gets sucked down.
and in. And it’s okay, you know, take a new inhale to try to feel these different spots, feeling the nose, sensing the diaphragm moving down. Maybe if you can have some hands on your ribs or belly, notice if the ribs moved up to right. Notice if the belly can move forward.
Notice if if your air gets really trapped in your chest or under your collarbones. Okay, that’s your penthouse suite. And a lot of people just like to hang out in the penthouse. They just want to stay, stay up here.
They don’t wanna go on the full tour of the whole torso. So don’t shortchange your tourists.
with what’s going on in your chest and your collarbones, they wanna go all the way down.
Now, something else we need to notice is that this elevator of your diaphragm, okay, it can’t descend unless a little bit of space is made. And you have an abdominal wall. You have your deep abs, your obliques, your rectus abdominis.
For now, just visualize like stretchy fabric wrapped around your whole torso, or like a wetsuit, or a really beautiful fitted sweater. And as the elevator comes down, that fabric needs to stretch, not dramatically, but just enough.
So I also talk about this in my book Yoga Life, but a lot of us are taught to suck it in, right? Like suck our belly in, or we pass a window and we see, like, I need to suck my belly in. Or, you know, ages ago women had to actually wear corsets to like suck it in, which basically put their diaphragms in a literal bind. Their diaphragms could not move down. But a lot of times we’re like, well, I want to have good posture, I want to look thin or whatever. So we’re sucking in our abdominals. But guess what? When we do that,
The diaphragm doesn’t have space. There’s no space for the diaphragm to move down. So just maybe notice right now: like, are you sucking it in, even just like very subtly? Sometimes it’s so subtle. So really try to completely soften your belly as you take your next inhale. And it’s on your exhale, actually, that your core, your abdominals, can engage a little bit to help the diaphragm on its journey back up.
So keep breathing with me. Hopefully you’re overthinking. Inhale the diaphragm, the elevator flattens and moves down, which means the walls need to widen, which means your abdominals relax and your trampoline of your pelvic floor yields, and your abs are soft, and the torus are smiling. And then you exhale and the elevator rises and the walls gently snuggle back in, and your trampoline of your pelvic floor rebounds.
And the abs naturally recoil and your tourists head back to the lobby and out your nose and everyone had a lovely visit and gives you a five star review on Yelp.
So for most of us, breathing in this way will actually feel a little bit funny. or we’ll feel like we’re totally overthinking because there is, there’s just so much going on. And most of us are what I call reciprocal inhibited breathers, meaning we suck our belly in or we engage our abs too tight, or we have our stomach in knots. Our diaphragm cannot move in its full range of motion the way it’s supposed to. And so it’s just kind of trapped under our ribcage, doing like
you know, like a mini down and up, mini down and up, mini down and up, mini down and up, which means you get so much less oxygen for CO two with each breath. Like instead of just needing to take
Five and a half breaths per minute, which is the ideal.
number of breaths you should be taking per minute for a super relaxed nervous system. many of us might be taking like twelve breaths per minute, which is basically telling your nervous system, like, we’re in an emergency situation where our diaphragm jellyfish can’t do its full range of motion. So all systems in this body slash building should be on alert.
So before we close, let’s just review like the key places where this beautiful elevator ride tends to go wrong. Like, let’s diagnose some of the common things. So, first, the sucking it in, like as if you’re wearing a corset when you really don’t need to be, or you’re trying to like hold your abs really tight. But actually you’re just like shrink wrapping and killing your elevator shaft
So your diaphragm can’t make those nice full ranges of motion all the way down, all the way up.
Here’s a second common dysfunction pattern.
What happens when an elevator gets jammed? Or what did I end up doing when I visited my friend in Paris?
I took the stairs, okay? Except for that first day when I had to get my big suitcase in. After that, I always took the stairs. Well, what does taking the stairs instead of the elevator feel like in your body? Your shoulders. Notice if your shoulders are lifted up as you breathe.
So when the elevator breaks, when your breathing is dysfunctional, well, everyone starts taking the stairs and that’s gonna feel like neck tension, All of a sudden your neck and your traps are involved in a job that they’ve never wanted and were never supposed to do.
Which is to help you breathe. And when you’re when you’re caught in that reciprocal inhibited breathing, that short, dysfunctional breath that just kind of stays in the chest, that’s also going to really recruit your neck and your traps to get involved.
Ironically, the third dysfunction pattern we can come across a lot is having really rigid posture and trying too hard. So when we thrust our shoulders super back and again like squeezing the abs or military posture,
We’re making the torso a concrete bunker instead of this like magical fun house where all these elements, the abdominals, the intercostal muscles and the ribs, are yielding and contracting in synchronicity.
A fourth dysfunction pattern is just this ho stress. And that results in often holding the breath. So I want you to think about yourself right now. When do you tend to hold your breath? For example, maybe sometimes I’m in a in running late and I’m, you know, in my car and I’m driving to a red light and I’m like right. Or someone says something really irritating and I like hold my breath in. So I want you to just start to subtly notice this week, like when do you hold your breath? Even if it’s really subtle, is it
When you check your email or look at text messages or traffic or when the the tonality of a certain person’s voice or when you look at Instagram and you’re seeing what someone’s about to comment on your thing, or when you’re teaching, or when you’re doing ballet, but like we all of us have unconscious breath holding. So that’s a place you want to get hyper-aware of and then think about relaxing the abs, you know, allowing the rib cage to get really wide so that your diaphragm can move in that full.
Range of motion.
Now, when you are in these dysfunction patterns, and this is the final character we have to meet in this story, it’s the building’s fire alarm. Have you ever been inside a building when the fire alarm goes off? Yeah, that’s not fun. And that is what our nervous system is receiving when the diaphragm and the pelvic floor are not doing this dance together of, again, I’ll say it again, the diaphragm contracting as it widens and moves down.
The pelvic floor relaxing and moving down with it, and then it’s the pelvic floor that contracts. You know, these are muscles, guys. It’s the pelvic floor that contracts and the diaphragm that relaxes to buoy back up and snuggle under your rib cage. So when your breathing becomes constantly rapid or shallow or held, it’s gonna reinforce your body’s fire alarm, this sense that something isn’t right. Stress changes breathing. Breathing
influences stress. So this is another key. Again, all of this is in chapter four of Yoga Life, my first book, for those of you that want to go deeper. But this is why breathing is so magical because it’s one of the few ways that we can actually communicate with our body, with our animal body. I can’t just think and tell my body, hey, I’d rather get my period today rather than next week. Or like, hey body, I’d rather you digest my sandwich later instead of right now. Or hey body, I’d love for you to just feel relaxed now.
Fortunately, it doesn’t work like that. But what we can do, where we can turn the dial, where we can control the the steering wheel that or the driver’s seat of our
Autonomic nervous system is through the breath. It’s like the place where we and our body speak the same language.
So when you change your breath, you’re affecting your nervous system. Every slow breath or every breath that you really try to focus on that full range of motion of the diaphragm going all the way down, rib cage expanding, belly puffing out, and the diaphragm coming all the way back up. Every slow breath like that is another message that tells your nervous system everything’s okay. And the fire alarm that you might be hearing, it’s a false alarm.
So I hope that you feel as we start to close this episode that your breath isn’t just moving air, okay? Your breath is moving your ribs, it’s moving your diaphragm, it’s coordinating your pelvic floor, it’s changing pressure throughout your body. This is a pressurized system. It’s communicating with your nervous system and ultimately and most importantly, changing how you feel. Every few seconds, the most
remarkable elevator in the entire world that lives inside you is taking another trip. So make sure it visits the whole building and that you’re letting it in.
Thank you so much for listening, for being here all the way to the very end. If you have a friend or fellow yogi who you think would enjoy this episode, please share it with them. It really helps support the show. if you’re loving what you’re learning on the podcast, join us inside our campus at Uplifted Yoga.
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Until next week, focus on your breath and take care of you.
