Yes. Even with the natural process of breathing, you can learn to control it and train your body to go without for longer and longer periods when needed. The control of your life energy, your aether, is the same. It already moves naturally within you and you call on it for battle. But you can learn to control it's flow within you. To allow more or less, creating precision and also to build up the pool of it within you by eventually learning to draw more of the natural life energy of the world into you instead of burning through your own.

But you have to learn to sense it and control it within you first. Only after knowing it internally, can you start sensing and controlling it externally. Sharing it, and being able to sense the depths of other's own power.