CONSCIOUS BREATHING RELEASES STRESS AND TENSION.
Healthy breathing has a direct and immediate
effect on stress levels. When at rest, people breathe
about 13 times a minute on the average. Men breathe a
little more slowly than women, with men.s rate being
12 to 14 times a minute compared with 14 to fifteen
times a minute for women. Most of us who work with
breathing consider anything above 15 breaths a minute
to be a stress signal.
When the human body is under stress, it responds with restricted breathing. The breath becomes shorter, shallower, and more in the chest than in the belly. When the body is relaxed, breathing slows down and drops farther into the belly, becoming deeper and more nurturing. When I explain this to clients, I contrast relaxed breathing with fight-or-flight breathing. Nature has given us two very different breathing patterns, designed for very different situations.
When we perceive a threat, several things happen to our breathing all at once. Our belly muscles tighten, our breath shifts up into the chest, and our breathing speeds up. We are poised to run or fight back. The sympathetic branch of our autonomic nervous system is fired up, dripping adrenaline into our bloodstreams and slowing digestion so that the energy can be diverted to our muscles. When we are no longer perceiving a threat, our breathing shifts from the fight-or-flight pattern to the relaxed pattern. Belly muscles relax, digestion starts again, and the breath drops down into the abdomen. The system goes .off alert,. and the parasympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system begins to take over. All of this can happen in a split second, regardless of whether the threat is a charging rhino or the unexpected midnight creak of a floorboard.
These are automatic responses, wired in by nature over thousands of years of evolution, and they come from deep in the primitive brain. But human beings are endowed with a magnificent cerebral cortex, a structure so complex that it seems magical. The cortex literally surrounds the primitive brain, and it gives us the power to override many of its instructions. We can use the power of our conscious minds to get our breathing to work with us, rather than against us. In other words, human consciousness is powerful enough that we can notice when we are in a stressed breathing pattern and do something about it. We can consciously take deeper, slower breaths, and we can consciously shift our breathing from chest to belly. I have seen this simple but powerful piece of information change many lives.
If you suffer any symptoms of stress in your life, conscious breathing should be a learning priority for you.
CONSCIOUS BREATHING CONTRIBUTES TO EMOTIONAL MASTERY
If you observe carefully, you will feel your
breathing shift when an emotion is present in your
body. A first step to mastery of feelings is simply to
notice when you are having one. After working with
your breathing for a while, you will likely become
more sensitive to shifts in your breathing, so that
you will know when an emotion is present. This skill
will give you an access to your feelings that can be
very helpful in communicating with others.
Breathing also plays a significant role in helping us clear feelings out of our bodies. Once you get a message from a feeling (say, "I'm scared"), you may want to make it disappear. Breathing is the fastest and most effective way to do this. Take a few breaths into the physical sensations of any emotion, and watch what happens. Many times, that.s all it takes to move it out of your body. I have witnessed this done a thousand times now, but it still moves me to see the look on people's faces when they learn that they are the master of their feelings.
CONSCIOUS BREATHING PREVENTS AND HEALS PHYSICAL
PROBLEMS
Today, people are taking charge of their own
health. Many have found that simple things • eating
healthy food, exercising, breathing, getting a massage
can have profound health benefits. Western medicine
is extremely good at dealing with certain problems
such as infections and emergencies. Most people in the
grip of a staph infection still choose treatment by
antibiotics rather than acupuncture. But with the
degenerative diseases Western medicine has a very poor
track record.
Breathing has a profound relationship to the health of our hearts. When blood pressure was first measured in 1732, Stephen Hales noticed that it rose and fell with the breath. If the person (or the horse, in Hales's case) is breathing normally, the blood pressure will increase slightly with the in-breath and decrease on the out-breath.
The chest-breather, the pattern that characterizes many heart patients, is chronically in a state of mild hyperventilation, discharging too much carbon dioxide from the blood through short, shallow breaths.
Many healings of other physical troubles have occurred in my clients after they started to integrate breathing practices into their lives. There is a simple but encompassing reason that may explain this. The human body is designed to discharge 70 percent of its toxins through breathing. Only a small percentage of toxins are discharged through sweat, defecation, and urination. If your breathing is not operating at peak efficiency, you are not ridding yourself of toxins properly. If less than 70 percent of your toxins are released through breathing, other systems of your body, such as your kidneys, must work overtime. This overwork can set the stage for a number of illnesses.
CONSCIOUS BREATHING FACILITATES PSYCHOSPIRITUAL
TRANSFORMATION
Breathwork in its deeper forms can help you
breathe free of limiting patterns laid down in
infancy, birth, and your first moments as a conceived
being. Here we are moving into a territory that is
difficult to prove in the scientific sense but that I
have seen clinically many times. After an extended
period of breathing, clients often have memories of
birth and even earlier events such as conception.
Breathing affects every cell in your body, and there
is mounting evidence that the cells themselves contain
imprints of past events. When you breathe deeply
enough, you are likely to stimulate a form of cellular
memory that can aid you in the resolution of early
trauma. During therapy I often ask a client to breathe
into a problem feeling. As the session goes along, the
person may sense that the feeling actually goes back
to birth itself.
I have seen many people have spontaneous experiences of love, forgiveness, and joy while doing breathwork. These feelings are all the more important because they have emerged from the body rather than from the mind.