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.

3 Tips to get through rough spots

Every human being is familliar with bumps in the road of life.  These bumps take shape as mental challenges, physical adversity or emotional rollercoasters that involve anger, fear, sadness and grief, shame or intense energies with no labels.  Challenges threaten any facit of your sense of identity; safety, security or stability, mourning (death) or loss of connection.  When ready to step back and see with new eyes and an open heart, reflect on these 5 tips;

1. See everyone as a mirror

Everyone you encounter is inviting you to get intimate with yourself so you understand hidden emotional triggers.  How you respond to people who describe their difficulties (or complain) echoes your relationship with your true self.  Notice what you accept, resist or reject, what evokes self-love or self-loathing. You may hear yourself saying, "what do you mean? I simply wish to offer support or help someone I know going through a rough period in their own life. How do I best do it?" The simple answer is; stop seeing separation between you and other. That is key.

2.  Get grounded

The best way to help others (and yourself) is to help them focus on their bodies and being present to this moment. This is especially useful if you get emotionally triggered by people who focus energy on what perpetuates negativity.  Acknowledge discomfort is part of a process of self-acceptance. It is valuable to shift attention from memories (past) to current situation and blessings in being here.  Grounding helps manage emotional pain because it highlights pain is linked to an emotional memory and has no power to hurt in this moment.  Being here now is a way to reclaim inner power. Pain is physical and suffering is mental.

3. Reconnection

Deepening connection is the ultimate life purpose.  You may assume facing adversity or natural disaster is required to shift priorities, view reality differently. Imagine seeing your stories for what they are, exploring and healing related trauma so it no longer controls your unconscious behaviour or projections.  This invites you to find new meaning or lessons in everyone you meet and every experience you have.  Notice whether you are pro-active or reactive to experience. You can reach a place where you only view problems as a figment of the imagination and watch them miraculously work themselves out.  Watch what happens as you realize any grief or loss you feel is not for a perceived other but a loss of connection with your truest self.  Reconnecting or deepening intimacy with others requires you first get to know yourself, your unconscious patterns and emotions on a very intimate level. Self-mastery is pure freedom.

7 Tips to see gifts in your defences

Defences are an ingenious gift we give ourselves.  They are strategies that help us get through adversity, trauma, and even survive.  The child's mind and adult mind have unique ways of dealing with discomfort. In order to master yourself, you need to appreciate and grasp ALL levels of defences.  That is, you have to grow conscious of what you are hiding from and why so the unconscious patterns cease to control your patterns of behaviour and projections. This allows you to form ‘the big picture’ of the way all the levels of defences interplay.  Contact us for session details.  Meanwhile, ponder 7 tips to gain new insight into the nature of your own defences:

1. Grow aware of childhood defence mechanisms

2. Get clear on adult defence tendencies

3. Explore character or personality structures that enable you to survive

4. Identify day-to-day behaviours that are defences in disguise

5. Connect defences with emotional blockages

6. Make shadows conscious & heal them

7. Allow effortless transformation to happen

(We all have a Self-Actualising’ Tendency that comes into play once our ‘blockages’ are removed.  In other words, your dreams realize themselves when you know to get out of your own way)

Colors, like features, follow the changes of emotions.- Pablo Picasso

3 Tips to progress in self-mastery

Mastering Time is mastering your ability to direct attention to and from different focal points.  Some people feel these points as different dimensions, frequencies, vibrations or harmonics.  It is all detection of  energy.  Consider these three tips to move further along your path to self-mastery.

1. Grow aware of conditioning

Awakening from the false reality you create requires you grow aware of how conditioning affects you, how your patterns develop, and act to nip this in the bud.  This invites you to let go of the urge to negative self talk, and release it as it arises.  Otherwise, the conditioned tendencies to judge, control and condition people to fit your models of perception continue.   

2. Re-tell your life story

Everyone has a story.  This is what makes human journeys unique.  Listen closely to yourself as you share your own.  Notice whether the voice recounting the story comes from the vibration of judgement or is it coming from a place of unconditional love? Peace and harmony occur naturally in an environment of unconditional love.  Once you love yourself unconditionally, you forgive others an yourself, so you can accept others as they are.

3. Accept what you say is right and wrong

The perception of whomever is listening determnes the validity of what you say, based on their point of view.  We are each responsible for the integrity and clarity of what we express.  We are not responsible for what others hear and feel because we do not control their perception.

5 Tips to master yourself

Its common to feel unfulfilled and also to underestimate your power to change.  Do you ever wonder if this life has more to offer, and if so, how to get a handle on it?  It is the perfect moment to pay closer attention.

Only as you get to know yourself inside out does the bigger picture begin to take shape.   Only then are you in position to consciously transform. Consider 5 tips to master yourself (or at least begin the process):

1. Notice the monkey mind

The monkey mind is engaged in imitating or distracting.  As long as the mind clings to belief, copies and adopts what it sees, it creates and perpetuates its own prison. An unestablished mind is highly influenced, ungrounded and unable to see clearly. Conscious attention is shifted to focus on unnecessary moments or situations.  Thoughts and emotions can escalate, disrupt natural balance and feeling centered.

2. Grow aware of unconscious behavior

Stepping back allows observing your own unconscious behavior.  This is about witnessing how you behave when you think nobody is watching. This is not about judging.  Its about simply growing aware of what you are doing and the underlying reasons or conditioning for it.  Being compassionate helps it grow clearer how you inhabit space. You may choose to videotape yourself and watch it play back. What is apparent?

3. Read your body language

Your body is the physical embodiment or manifestation of your unconscious attitudes, intents and desires.   Observe yourself when alone and with others. How do you sit? What is your posture? Do you lean or slouch?How do you carry your head and the rest of your body? Observations tell you about your attitudes, intents and desires.  How you move, and where you place yourself in relation others, says a lot.

4. Deepen the personal inventory

Branch out from mental chatter, body language and verbal communication. Ask yourself, how and why am I showing up?  Am I typically expressive, well-spoken or at a loss for words?  Am I allowing a range of emotions to flow though and be expeirenced or I am limiting my feelings? Am I generally active or passive? Do I appear confident?    Keep a daily diary of what stands out and also what is changing.

5. Create a well-established mind

A well-established mind  has a handle on the four directions of an integrated system. This whole system includes your mind, your body, your emotions, your energies.  When your thougths, words and actions are in harmony, you experience harmony in your external perception.