Breathwork Is So Good For You
Why is a breathwork practice especially important right now? Today many of us are living with chronic stress, putting us in a nearly constant state of fight or flight. This state sets the stage for inflammation, which leads to many—most?—diseases and disorders. The fight or flight response was never meant to be chronic; it’s there when we need it for brief periods of time.
Chronic stress arises because your body doesn’t know the difference between the stress you feel when you watch an upsetting news story, open an angry email, get an unexpected bill in the mail, or scroll through your social media feed, and the stress you would feel if you needed to react quickly to slam on your brakes because an animal ran out in front of your car. Your body interprets it all as a threat to your survival. And the news, the emails, the bills, and the social media feeds are incessant. These signals that your life is in danger result in your body constantly preparing for battle rather than doing the many other things it needs to do to be healthy.
When you place your attention on your breath, however, your body receives the signal that it is safe. The way your body sees it, if you happen to have enough time to put your attention on your breath and breathe in a certain way, you’ve got to be pretty safe.
Breathwork is an amazingly effective tool that anyone can use to quickly change what’s currently happening within the body.
What a relief! Your body realizes that it doesn’t need to prepare to fight off or run from a saber-toothed tiger. You wouldn’t possibly be able to pay attention to how you were breathing if there WERE a real threat of imminent death—as in a saber-tooth tiger chasing you down the street.
Once it has realized that you are safe, your body can make the move from being ruled by the sympathetic nervous system—the “fight or flight” response—to being under the control of the parasympathetic nervous system, where it can rest, digest, relax, recover, repair, renew, and enjoy and experience life.
Breathwork is an amazingly effective tool that anyone can use to quickly change what’s currently happening within the body.
Join us online for just a daily half-hour breathwork practice that will radically change how you are feeling!