The following excerpt comes from the more personal, memoir-like part of my forthcoming book. Some parts of the book are light and funny, while others are more serious, including the historical sections about Dr. Buteyko’s discoveries and the original Moscow Clinic. This excerpt is different. It is intimate and intense. I decided to share it because it shows how the Buteyko Method was not only something I taught, but something I had to live – through unusual and sometimes very difficult circumstances.
Copyright © 2026 Sasha Yakovleva. All rights reserved.
Anger, I’ve learned, can be powerful fuel.
I used mine to act quickly on Drakon’s wish for a divorce. I looked up the legal process, found an attorney, and filed the paperwork. Done!
Thankfully, our separation did not involve a battle over money, property, or children.
The house was mine. The money was his. But what about the baby?
The house belonged to me under our prenuptial agreement, and Drakon did not want it anyway, since he had no intention of staying in the area.
The money was his because he still had a significant part of his inheritance left. I had no money because after entering my retreat, I had stopped working and was living off savings that were nearly gone.
So, in that sense, those parts of our consensual divorce were simple.
The only legal tie still binding us was the Buteyko Breathing Center, which we used to call our baby. But Drakon told me that since he planned to support himself through investments, he no longer wished to be involved with the Center. This made things easy.
But for me, this part was especially hard.
We had brought the Buteyko Center to life together, though our roles were different.
Drakon became the face of the business — a “poster boy,” as he jokingly called himself. He was the one who had healed his asthma. He was a clinical psychologist, and on top of his Johns Hopkins credentials, he had the charisma and confidence our potential clients needed to see. He answered phone calls, made sales, taught the method, stayed in touch with our clients, carried the public authority of the work, and represented the method outwardly. And he loved it!
Me? I was the quiet one, taking care of the parts of the business where I had experience. I ran the Center and did whatever was needed to help it grow. I built and maintained the website, which became almost a Buteyko encyclopedia. I wrote articles, created videos, developed programs, and enjoyed staying in the background while my husband stood in the limelight.
At that time, I did not see myself as a teacher. I worked with clients mostly when Drakon was unavailable, tired, or when, according to him, they were difficult to handle. At the same time, he referred to me as his primary teacher, and I suppose this was somewhat true. I taught him much of what I had received from Russian sources, along with my own understanding of the method, which had deepened through my experience with Dharma. Drakon always encouraged me to teach more, but it was difficult for me to accept the role of teacher, especially because, according to my own standards, my English was never good enough.
No matter what our roles were, we took care of everything together. It was a family business!
And now I was about to become a single parent.
I was not ready for this.
Trying to picture myself—a Russian immigrant in America—managing our unusual and complicated business alone felt overwhelming. Each time my mind went there, questions crowded in: How would I keep the Center going without my partner? Who would be the main teacher? How would I support myself? Trying to answer these questions made me anxious, so for the sake of my breathing, I chose not to think about the future.
To make things worse, I was beginning to feel uneasy living under the same roof with my husband. His behavior, together with his breathing patterns, had begun to move into territory I found alarming.
Or perhaps the problem was me…
One day, during our conversation, I observed him hyperventilating by repeatedly inhaling through his mouth. Audibly, forcefully, heavily.
It was painful to witness. I knew well the damage this habit could do to his respiratory system and overall health, including his brain. Years before we met, Drakon had developed PTSD as a result of a car accident. When we first got together, some symptoms, such as forgetfulness, were sometimes noticeable. Over time, the Buteyko Method helped him recover. Nevertheless, I was aware that the return of old breathing habits invites the return of old symptoms. Or new ones.
I kept telling myself that his breathing was no longer my concern. And yet I could not stop myself from wanting to help him, as I had always done.
I knew I had to be mindful. A direct comment about his breathing would upset or anger him; instead, I needed a skillful approach – perhaps something light, almost playful.
Aha! An idea came to me.
I curled my hand into a loose fist and moved it toward his face.
“Breathe through your nose as often as you eat through your mouth,” I said, chuckling, and gave his nose a gentle tap.
I expected my husband to be amused by my little joke.
Instead, he screamed.
“What did you do? You hit me badly! How dare you? I’m in pain. A lot of pain. Yes, lots of pain!”
I stared at him, dumbfounded.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, faltering. “But I truly thought I barely touched you. Did I really hit you? I can’t believe it. I was very gentle.”
“Gentle? You hit me hard,” he yelled.
Then he turned around and stormed off to his room.
Am I going insane? I had to ask myself. Am I the problem?
I knew I had no intention of hurting him, but could I have hit him without being aware of it? Am I losing touch with reality?
I retreated to my room and settled onto a cushion, folding my legs into lotus position. It felt right to turn to a meditation practice called calm-abiding. I needed to rest in a place within myself that was peaceful and undistracted.
So, I placed my awareness on my breath and began to follow it, using a traditional Buddhist technique that I had adapted to the Buteyko approach.
I am breathing in, I said silently as I inhaled.
I am breathing out, I said silently as I exhaled.
I am not breathing, I said silently when the breath stopped.
This last sentence was the part I had added.
I found myself saying it quickly since my automatic pause was now just a brief flicker. My breath stopped for only a second or two before moving on. Yet the pause still remained despite the altitude, the stress, and the storm of emotions. I had not slipped back to the way I used to breathe before Buteyko, when my breath ran nonstop without even the smallest break between exhaling and inhaling.
I kept trying to abide in calm, but my body had a different plan.
Instead of meditating, it began menstruating.
I felt the first drops of blood slowly making their way out of my body, and possibly reaching the cushion beneath me.
This was not surprising. Although my cycle had become unpredictable because of travel and stress, I knew my period was coming. Two days earlier, my PMP had dropped, as it always did before menstruation, and I had begun to feel unwell. I wanted nothing more than a warm blanket, comfort food, and something mindless to watch on TV.
This feeling of being unwell during menstruation is familiar to women. It is logical to assume that it would disappear once the PMP improves, but Dr. Buteyko stated that, although it typically becomes less intense, it does not vanish.
Why? Because, according to him, a woman’s body experiences menstruation as an illness.
I know this conclusion may sound outrageous, especially in our patriarchal world where women’s suffering has so often been dismissed or minimized. Modern society, unlike many older cultures, tends to insist that menstruation is simply “natural,” and that a healthy woman should feel perfectly fine during her period – well enough to work, exercise, care for everyone else, and carry on as if nothing is happening. But regardless of what men say, most women don’t feel their best while menstruating. Period.
From a physiological perspective, Dr. Buteyko’s statement made sense. Before menstruation, the Positive Maximum Pause typically drops and may remain low throughout bleeding. When it ends, the PMP rises again, which helps explain why many women feel better once their period is over. This pattern resembles what happens during a mild illness – for example, a cold or flu.
In my own case, this feeling of “mild sickness” decreased significantly after I began practicing the Buteyko Method because some of my PMS symptoms disappeared entirely, or almost entirely. During my periods, I used to have painful cramps, and in addition, my breasts would become painfully swollen from water retention. After applying the method, these symptoms gradually went away, though, just as Dr. Buteyko stated, I never stopped feeling slightly ill during my periods.
While sitting on the cushion and bleeding, I began to think about how strange our collective attitude toward menstruation is.
Blood is red, sometimes even scarlet. This color usually signals danger, alert, or emergency. When blood comes from any opening in the body, we understand that something needs attention. We may even need to call 911.
The vagina is the only exception.
When blood comes from that part of the body, we are taught to say, “This is normal.” But Dr. Buteyko did not see it that way. His explanation of why a woman’s body perceives menstruation as abnormal is fascinating, but too long to include here.
In that moment, what mattered was not the explanation but where it led me. It pointed me to something more relevant to my situation: the border between “normal” and “abnormal” was not as clear as I had believed.
While kept attempting to meditate, it became obvious that my restless mind was not going to settle into “calm-abiding,” so I looked for tranquility in a more conventional way.
I got up, wiped the blood from the cushion, stepped into the shower, changed into fresh clothes, and poured myself a glass of red wine. Then I settled onto the couch, pulled a warm blanket over my body, and let my dog nestle close beside me.
“Life isn’t that bad,” I tried to convince myself while sipping the wine.
This brought a small sense of relief. To feel even better, I decided to stop resisting my emotions and simply let myself feel what I felt.
I feel so sorry for myself, I realized and began sobbing, struggling to keep inhaling through my nose.
Well, crying always brings mouth-breathing, and in that moment, I had to accept it. Only after my tears stopped, I was able to breathe through my nose again.
Утро вечера мудренее. I said to myself then.
This was an old Russian proverb my nanny used to say to me when I was a little girl, crawling into her bed crying.
This phrase can be translated as “Morning is wiser than evening,” but its meaning is broader: have faith, everything will be better the next day. Just sleep on it.
And that is exactly what I did.
By the next morning, I discovered that this piece of Russian wisdom did not work in America.
“See what you did to me?” Drakon said, pointing at his nose when he spotted me sitting on the porch, drinking my morning tea.
I looked at his face – there was a dark blue mark across his nose.
“That’s impossible,” I said, jerking upright and spilling tea from my cup. “I barely touched you.”
“Barely touched me? Just look at this!”
The bruise was mottled, with several small red spots scattered across it. I wondered if they were traces of blood, though they looked flat, not like the raised, darkened marks of a healing wound. The whole thing seemed strange to me.
I narrowed my eyes and leaned closer, trying to make sense of what I was seeing.
Drakon stepped back, leaving a gap between us.
Still, I kept staring at the bruise. It looked real. It must be real, I told myself. But how was this possible?
Later that day, while I was sitting on the porch, I saw Drakon demonstrating his wound to Charlie. They were standing near the big pine tree, and Drakon was pointing to his nose.
“See this bruise?” he said. “It’s hard to believe, but my wife hit me.”
I am sure the bruise looked real to Charlie, too. And to a couple of other neighbors, Drakon stopped as they passed by our property.
“It’s hard to believe, but my wife hit me,” he told them, each time pointing at his nose and taking a heavy inhale through his mouth.
The irony was painful. For years, Drakon had pointed to his nose in almost exactly the same way, explaining why nasal breathing was essential to health and urging people to stop breathing through the mouth. Now that very nose was bruised (or stained?) as if it had become a mocking advertisement against the Buteyko Method and everything we had taught, practiced, and built our lives around.
Humiliated, I ducked back inside the house.
Was he gaslighting me?
Or perhaps I was truly losing my mind. Maybe in my attempts to make sense of what no longer made sense, I was gaslighting myself.
But not everything was dark. Despite all that was happening, there were still occasional moments of warmth between us.
One evening, as the temperature dropped in the Rocky Mountains, I prepared dinner while Drakon built a fire. We sat together with plates of spaghetti squash, watching the flames dance in the fireplace. I was still bleeding, still feeling raw, and perhaps that made the fragile beauty of this simple moment feel even more precious, reminding me how our life used to be.
After dinner, we settled on the couch. I curled up on one side as I often did, but instead of stretching my legs out, I tucked them beneath me. This position felt awkward, and after a few minutes of struggle, I extended them.
Drakon drew my feet onto his lap and began to massage them, as he had done so many times before. The familiar touch eased my tension, and I began relaxing.
Then Drakon looked into my eyes and said, “I want to talk about the future.”
“Okay,” I said, nodding, not knowing what to make of it.
“Since we’re divorcing,” he continued, “I’m concerned that you won’t have enough money to cover the house expenses or take care of yourself. I know it will be difficult for you to run the business alone. Besides, the Breathing Center’s income has always been unpredictable.”
“Mm-hmm,” I acknowledged what he said, trying to hold back my tears.
“Because of that,” he said, “I’ve decided to leave you the thirty thousand dollars from my inheritance. It is still in our joint account because I had set it aside for the new roof. I had intended to take it with me, but under the circumstances, I would rather you have some financial security. My point is: I want you to keep it.”
“Thank you for your kind offer,” I replied, “but it’s your inheritance. You should take it. You’re starting a new life, and you’ll need money. I’m sure I will figure something out.”
“No, no, no,” he replied, shaking his head. “This is non-negotiable. That money is yours. I want you to know that I care about you and always will.”
“No,” I said, “I think you’ll need it.”
I could still feel the blood flowing from my body, leaving me vulnerable, as if some protective layer had been stripped away.
“Not negotiable,” my husband said confidently. “I am leaving this sum in our joint account. It’s yours.”
A strong tide of gratitude rose in my heart, spreading through my entire body. In that moment, I felt deeply loved and cared for, just as I had often felt throughout our marriage.
I knew I belonged to a category of people for whom giving came easily, but receiving was a challenge. Helping others had never been difficult for me, but asking for help — or even accepting it when I needed it — always felt hard. Still, I knew I could change.
I let out a few awkward snorts, swallowing my emotions.
“Okay,” I finally said. “Thank you. I can’t tell you how grateful I am that you care.”
“You are welcome,” he said, giving me a big hug while reminding me that our love goes beyond just one lifetime.
The next morning, when I walked downstairs, I found Drakon packing his clothes into a large suitcase.
“I’ve decided to move to California,” he said. “But I will stay at a hotel in Denver for the next week, until our court date, when the divorce is finalized.”
“Okay,” I murmured, stunned.
My breathing turned erratic, as if it might escape from my chest. I kept inhaling through my nose, but I noticed my husband no longer even tried. Each word he said was accompanied by heavy mouth-breathing, which seemed to be his new old pattern. I reminded myself that his breathing was no longer my concern.
And I was right.
An hour later, he was gone.
The house was in chaos. His room looked as if a tornado had swept through it: papers, gadgets, flashlights, crystals, financial investment courses, CDs, and all sorts of things he had purchased or collected while I was away.
It felt as if the ground had vanished beneath me, as if I had been thrown into a cosmic free fall and had missed my home planet.
Still, I reassured myself that at least I would not have to worry about money during this difficult transition. Despite everything, Drakon was still my protector.
I opened my laptop and logged into our joint bank account, wanting to see the $30,000 that now represented safety for me. When the account page loaded, I drew a sharp breath through my mouth.
The balance read: $50.
The transaction list showed that Drakon had moved $30,000 to his personal account the night before.
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This excerpt is from Sasha Yakovleva’s forthcoming book on the Buteyko Method. Please do not copy, reproduce, distribute, or share this text without written permission from the author.
