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A Breathing and Hand Technique to Raise Body Heat
You do not have to be a monk to do this.
It was said that Tibetan Buddist monks who practiced g-tummo breathing produced body heat that was sufficiently hot to steam and dry wet towels placed on their shoulders.
Such a feat was confirmed in a piece of official news from Harvard, based on the research of Herbert Benson, a cardiologist, professor of medicine, and founder of the Mind/Body Medical Institute at Harvard Medical School, who also spent about a decade with the Tibetan monks in the 1970s.
G-tummo breathing is also called vase breathing. A person first holds their breath and then contracts the abdominal and pelvic muscles, so that the belly looks like a vase, for 5–15 seconds. This is done in a static sitting position. There is also a mental imagery aspect, in which one visualizes flame in the body’s core that later spreads out. A more detailed stepwise account can be found here.
What Older Studies Have Found
The first scientific study on this topic, “Body Temperature Changes During the Practice of g Tum-mo Yoga,” was published in Nature in 1982. Prof. Benson and co-workers measured the body temperature of three Tibetan monks when practicing g-tummo breathing in a cold environment — i.e., in an uninsulated stone hut at altitudes of 1800–2800m. “We found that these subjects exhibited the capacity to increase the temperature of their fingers and toes by as much as 8.3°C,” the authors wrote.
Later in 1990, the same team published another study in Behavioral Medicine. They showed that three Tibetan monks on g-tummo breathing had a 61% increase in metabolic rate (measured by VO2 max; i.e., maximal oxygen consumption). And their metabolism can drop by up to 64% at post-breathing, indicating a compensatory mechanism at play.
In a 2000 study, Prof. Benson and team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to see what was happening in the brains of five Tibetan monks engaged in g-tummo breathing. Results revealed greater brain activities in “neural structures involved in attention (frontal and parietal cortex) and arousal/autonomic control (pregenual anterior cingulate, amygdala, midbrain and hypothalamus).” The team then theorized that…
