BREATHWORK

Deep breathing is the key to access health, calmer states of being and ultimately to be your best self, living your best life.

Breathwork is instructed and utilized in all sessions as a tool to teach the empowering ability to shift and calm the nervous system. Often it is the first intervention, the quickest and most accessible method to calm the nervous system while in session with adults and children, the gateway to meditation and almost always an aspect of homework.

Breath Work is a general term which describes any type of therapy that utilizes breathing exercises to improve mental, physical, and spiritual health and well-being.  It is the conscious engagement and at times controlling of breath to influence the nervous system inducing a calming state.

         Breathwork & The Inner Balance Sensor

A biofeedback tool also used is The Inner Balance System. This system was originated by the well known and cutting edge research center, The Heart Math Institute.

This biofeedback method uses visual, auditory, and felt senses to align the body, mind, and spirit. Aligning and calming the nervous system gives access to those best self qualities of compassion, love, generosity, kindness, contentedness, and peace.

It is not hard to feel overwhelmed, anxious and chaotic in our seemingly frenetic world. The Inner Balance System is a training tool which teaches a shifting of the nervous system, replacing overwhelm and anxiety with physical and emotional balance, inducing a state of “coherence”, a term coined by The Heart Math Institute.

Being in a state of coherence with the use of the Inner Balance Sensor replenishes your energy from that all too often state of fatigue. It helps to balance emotions for improved personal, work, and worldly relationships. It profoundly improves focus, composure, concentration, and mental performance upon learning to shift and refocus.

How It Works:

The Inner Balance System is a sensor that is connected to your body by clipping it lightly onto your ear. This sensor is connected to an app through Bluetooth. The sensor incorporates an advanced heart rate monitor that measure subtle changes in your heart rate rhythms called Heart Rate Variability (HRV). HRV is a measurement that has been used in the study of meditation research community for years. HRV measurement reflects heart-brain interaction and the dynamics of the autonomic nervous system.

The autonomic nervous system is the window into the physiology of the states of rest and digest (calm/peaceful states) and fight or flight (stress response) in your body.

From the Heart Math Institute:

Coherence Breakthrough
Inner Balance is based on “the coherence breakthrough”. Coherence is a state of synchronization between your heart, brain and autonomic nervous system that has been proven to have numerous mental, emotional and physical benefits. You can think of coherence as a simultaneous state of relaxation, readiness, and revitalization. Some refer to this as a balanced state of composure or poise. Coherence improves performance, health and emotional well-being.

  • More ease and inner peace
  • Better sleep
  • Less friction in relationships
  • Less worry
  • More alertness
  • Better focus and decision making
  • More positive attitudes
  • Increased composure and calm

Experience the Difference 
When you experience stressful emotions such as frustration, anxiety, irritation and anger, your heart-rhythm pattern becomes irregular and incoherent, negatively affecting your health, brain function, performance and sense of well-being. When you experience renewing emotions such as appreciation, dignity, joy and love, your heart-rhythm pattern is more ordered and coherent.

 

 

 Breath & The Nervous System

What we know for sure:

  • Deep breathing can help lessen stress and anxiety
  • Breathing deeply and slowly from the gut, sometimes called diaphragmatic breathing signals the nervous system to calm down
  • Deep controlled breathing to shift the nervous does take practice
  • The more you breath consciously to calm the nervous system the more efficiently it works

We don’t often think of our breath. Yet, it is always with you, always there, and as long as you are alive, the breath breathes itself through a magnificent and miraculous sequence of events, reflexes, and networking of the nervous system.

How you breathe when you consciously and purposefully connect to your breath can have a huge impact on your physiology and your emotional state, both being intertwined for an ultimate effect on your stress levels.

When you are stressed or anxious, breathing tends to be irregular and shallow, your chest cavity does not fully inflate making it difficult to bring in oxygen. Because it does not inflate fully, it also does not deflate fully., creating a vicious cycle of not being able to get enough air in.

Breath Work is a practice that enables more airflow into your body calming the nervous system, reducing stress and anxiety. There are also huge implications for pain relief as well as improving mental acuity, concentration, and focus.

 

Breath is the key to the body’s stress response

A quick nervous system tutorial:

Your autonomic nervous system (ANS) is the peripheral part of your nervous system that controls automatic responses in the periphery of your body, controlling automated bodily actions such as heart rate, breath rate, digestion, dilation of your pupils, and where blood is shunted as needed.

One part of the ANS is the Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS). This arm of the system, otherwise known as fight or flight system, is in charge of reacting quickly, it saves our life when needed as it gets and keeps us out of harms way by increasing heart and breath rate, pupillary dilation so we can see well to get to safety, shunts all blood from the digestive system to the skeletal muscles to make it possible for us to MOVE to safety.

In contrast, we have the Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS) otherwise known as rest & digest arm of the ANS. The parasympathetic system shifts all bodily actions towards rest and digest: pupils with normal dilation, blood is shunted to the center of the body for digestion; heart rate and breath rate is slow/normal. Our emotions are calm and we can easily fall asleep when the PNS is dominant.

Key takeaway: These two arms of the nervous system are inversely related. This means that when one is dominating, the other quiets. When you activate the fight or flight response the rest and digest response will go quiet because they have equal and opposite jobs in the body.

Ideally, the parasympathetic nervous system will dominate our existence upwards of 90% of the time. For many, if not most of us, we do not need to be in flight or fight. We do not need to be in survival mode as we live out our lives.

Due to many factors such as extraordinary busyness of life, overscheduled, overworked, and an overstimulating environment, our nervous system’s have shifted from being in rest and digest to being in a chronic state of flight or flight.

A chronic state of stress has huge implications in the health of the body including the following big hitters:

  • Diabetes Type II,
  • Heart Disease
  • Digestion Complications
  • Autoimmune Syndromes
  • Sleep Disorders
  • Chronic Pain
  • Anxiety

Deep breathing is the key to access health, calmer states of being and ultimately to be your best self, living your best life.

Peace IN ~ Peace OUT

Find More of my meditations here.

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