The following is a synthesized excerpt from the book Breath by James Nestor.
The Breath Process and Breath Anatomy and Physiology
To understand how we breathe, we need to consider the parts of the body beyond the nose and mouth. After all, the nose and the mouth are simply gateways for the long journey of breath. Your body, like all human bodies, is essentially a collection of tubes. There are wide tubes, like the throat and the sinuses, and very thin tubes like capillaries. The tubes that make up the tissues of the lungs are very small, and we've got a lot of them. More than 15,000 miles of [breathing airways] within you.
Each breath you take must first travel down the throat, pass the… tracheal carina, which splits into the right and left lungs. As it keeps going, that breath gets pushed into smaller tubes called bronchioles until the air molecules dead ends at 500 million little bulbs called the alveoli.
Breath moves through the body like a cruise ship down a river, loading and unloading passengers. As oxygen molecules move through the body, they will slip through the membranes of our breathing tubes and lodge themselves inside these cellular cruise ships that travel through the bloodstream.
As the blood molecules – in this analogy, the cruise ship - pass through tissues and muscles, oxygen will disembark, providing fuel to hungry cells. As oxygen offloads, other passengers, namely carbon dioxide - the waste product of metabolism - will pile aboard, and the cruise ship will begin a return journey back to the lungs.
Eventually, the cruise ship will make its round through the body and back to port, back to the lungs, where carbon dioxide will exit the body through the alveoli, up the throat, and out the mouth and nose in an exhale. Then we breathe again and repeat.
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The most important aspect of breathing wasn't just to take in air through the nose. Inhaling was the easy part. The key to breathing, lung expansion, and the long life that came with it was on the other end of respiration. it was the transformative power of a full exhalation.
We must master the exhalation.
Patients who suffer from respiratory diseases like emphysema do so not because they can't get fresh air into their lungs, but because they can't get enough stale air out.
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