Retrain your body to breathe

Everyone breathes but as it is, very few people breathe fully or make connections betweeen how they breathe and their day-to-day behaviours, addictions or other issues. No wonder retraining the body to breathe is gaining momentum and growing more popular than basic yoga or meditation. When ready, a range of breathwork practices enter your scope.

Why take steps to decode our breath? It reveals much about the state of our bio-psycho-social health and empowers us to take responsibility for our lives on a whole new level. Breathing training boosts lung volume and prevents the loss of respiratory capacity. It helps us connect emotions with breathing rhythm and heart rate. What if we could strengthen our posture, heart and spinal health? Breathwork makes us more flexible and resilient and it facilitates the body’s natural self-healing powers. Ready to dive right in?

What if I highlight that breathwork helps us to heal tension, manage chronic pain, fear, depression and anxiety disorders when drugs and other traditional methods are ineffective? It improves our moods, emotions, and sleep states. In addition, breathwork helps us to expand awareness, confidence, intuition, self-esteem, self-appreciation, and self-love and acceptance.

Further, gaining insight into the breath supports heart health and boosts mental health. It allows us to hack into our immune system, our nervous system and our brain, to reclaim or regain control over issues such as high blood pressure, inflammation, asthma, chronic stress, chronic fatigue, and a variety of addictions.

Conscious Breathing techniques trigger the release of opioids (natural pain killers and anti-depressants), as well as dopamine and serotonin (“happy and calming” hormones—neurotransmitters of pleasure, motivation and memory). And they also reduce cortisol levels (the stress hormone) the repeated release of which can itself become addictive.

And what about eating disorders? breathing training helps improve digestion and it supports weight loss. Ever wonder where our weight goes as we lose it? Studies show that most of that weight is eliminated through the breath!

So how do we discover the nature of our habits? Poor breathing habits, especially in children, are known to cause unhealthy development and disturbing changes in facial muscles, joints, bones, and teeth alignment. Our ancestors had naturally healthy breathing habits, and they all had straight teeth! So, even the state of our teach is a clue to our breathing habits and deeper issues that may be unconscious!

Many people also ask whether breathwork can assist with healing emotional issues. Breathwork training clears stale stagnant energy from our system. It helps us to access, manage and release suppressed emotions, to control our nervous system and alter our brainwaves. We can recall how this feels and tune into the natural rhythm by retraining the body to breathe. Breathing properly allows us to relax and energize ourselves on demand. What if engaging in breathwork could change our vibration, outlook and attitude? Even a spark of curiosity arising prompts one to explore this more. Get ready to uncover the unexpected, experience life more fully and breath in ways that enable feeling more alive.

Get More out of Life

To get more out of life, its useful to get in touch with our thoughts, emotions and feelings and also be aware of what is happening in the body.

By practising breathwork, we may grow acutely aware of grief, fears, loss, anger, physical pain, emotional pain and energetic imbalances. Many people have heard of the unconscious mind but you may not be aware of the difference between conscious and unconscious breathing and how unconscious breathing plays out in your body.  What if growing aware can improve your health and be a turning point for positive change?

There are periods or situations in our lives when we feel unsafe or unloved. We may hold onto emotional pain for many years, if not lifetimes, until we are ready to address those feelings.  By growing aware of the emotional body and allowing it space to communicate, we gain insight into ourselves and opportunity to heal past or ongoing wounding.  Being present to painful or uncomfortable emotions does not mean acting them out in harmful ways.  Rather, breathwork and related meditation practices allow us to be present with and feel these emotions. To get the most out of life, we are invited to love, accept and integrate all of ourselves. 

If this post resonates, invite you to search relevant key words for related articles like:

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Interview with Dan Brule 

Interview with Steven Farmer

Interview with Jaan Sanaam (Jerabek)

5 Tips to take things in stride

Life is full of surprises.  We may tell ourselves that we assume we always know our destination and are familliar with the route of travel.  Yet, in many cases, our journey turns out to be more of a winding path with frequent stops or detours in unexpected places.  It can sometimes feel very confusing, even trigger emotional roller coasters.  Our personal and professional relationships may also be challenged. Here are ten tips to take things in stride;

1. Listen to the breath

2. Tune into body sensations

3. Grow aware of thoughts and beliefs and core values

4. Ask for advice or guidance from someone you trust

5.  Grow aware of to whom and why we give our power away 

12 keys to living more authentically

Many people are seeking authenticity and wonder why obstacles arise in this Path.  Watch what happens as it dawns that every apparent obstacle is actually a stepping stone to experiencing life from a point of wholeness.  Everything we do is like taking another step or leap into the loving arms of authentic being. Reflect on these 12 keys to living more authentically:

1. Tune into your internal messaging system

2. Sit with emotions (and hear their messages)

3. Take ownership for your feelings, thoughts and behaviours (rather than blaming others)

4. Keep your promises (live in integrity)

5. Do contemplative work (shadow work & inner child work)

6. Explore mindfulness techniques (i.e.varied approaches to meditation)

7. Explore dream symbols & images

8. Uncover interplay among identities

9. Know self is the only person you can help

(we can change our beliefs and behaviours, how we are perceiving, discover how authenticity feels and live from this vibrational point. We cannot force another person to do any of this.)

10. Develop wisdom (the result of life experience, intuition, discernment & deep inner listening)

11. Be open to forgive (allow yourself to experience the grief process: includes difficult feelings of anger, sorrow, anguish and dissapointment)

12. Know experiencing all emotions fully without judgement opens the heart to self-love  

5 steps to decode emotions

Growing aware of suppressed emotions is a step toward freedom that can be experienced in emotional release. We are often conditioned to keep our true feelings to ourselves rather than express how we feel in the moment. Cathartic breathwork psychotherapy, emotional release technique (ERT) and freedom release technique (FRT) all draw from the power of intuition to guide us to freedom.  Consider 5 tips to decode our emotions:

1) Understand our deepest fears

We each experience a range of emotions on a spectrum. To be willing to explore how we feel, implies writing or journal or taking other steps to make conscious what the emotional upheaval is really about.

2) Be willing to let go of what we cannot control

When patient, we can uncover blessings and wisdom within sources of apparent discomfort.  All emotions can be understood as a gauge as to whether you are being truly honest or inauthentic.

3) Reframe mid-life crisis

One view is that every 21 years, the body experiences emotional upheavals that may take shape as growing annoyances, then perceived mid-life crisis or really shake up our paradigm.  We can view and feel this as an internal build up or blocks of energy. This is an invitation to pay attention, uncover and release suppressed emotions before the volcano erupts into something more serious.

4) Live life to the fullest

Discover what it is to feel the gamut of emotions.  We need not focus on emotional trauma.  Making the unconscious conscious empowers us to see beyond it. Come what may, we can all refer to emotions as a guide to greater wellness and optimum living. We always have a choice about how to perceive and experience life.

5) Find support

If relevant, be open to the services, healers and other guidance that presents.  Everything is synchronicity when it comes to decoding our emotions.  Ask and it is given. Be open-minded and see what already presents.