By Leah Pardee

What exactly is Breathwork? Don’t I already know how to breathe?

Actually, most of us living in modern societies don’t breathe properly. And that’s just one part of what makes Breathwork so important.

You’ve felt it. The tension in your neck and shoulders. Stress manifesting in the body. This, in addition to being hunched over on phones and computers all day, inhibits our natural breathing. It keeps our breath shallow. We aren’t fully utilizing our diaphragm as we breathe. And that’s if we even are – stress often causes us to hold our breath at times, such as when opening a work email.

1. It Trains The Body To Breathe Properly

When we fail to use our entire diaphragm, and instead breathe shallow, Carbon Dioxide starts to build up in our body. This makes our blood more acidic, which can cause diseases, such as cancer, to thrive. It can also cause a buildup of toxins in the body, and malabsorption of nutrients in cells. This can cause lack of energy, skin problems, digestive problems, and inflammation. Our cells may not even be getting enough Oxygen to properly reproduce.

Breathwork opens up and cleanses the respiratory system, which influences and improves function of the body’s other systems, such as the digestive system, nervous system, immune system, and cardiovascular system.

Intermittent breath holding, often part of Breathwork, also has surprising benefits. It trains the body to burn toxins and use everything in the body more effectively. The body learns to work harder for oxygen, strengthening the respiratory system. More red blood cells and hemoglobin are produced.

Benefits of this part of the practice also include strengthening the immune response, enhanced spatial learning and memory, decreased inflammation, and weight loss.

Do Breathwork regularly, and you’re training the your to breathe properly.

2. It Makes Meditation Easier

I can’t tell you how many people have reached out and told me this: “I can’t meditate!”

I get it. In our fast paced society, with all of our technology, we almost never set aside time to be in stillness. Even just the thought of being in a totally quiet setting with the intention of just sitting freaks most people out.

And that’s exactly why we need it.

But it is hard. Attempting to quiet our mind, observe our thoughts, and relax is hard. Breathwork may sound like the more advanced practice, which is what I thought for a long time. But it’s actually the easiest way to get into a meditative state.

Breathwork is an active meditation. It involves specific breathing patterns that actually shut off the brain’s Default Mode Network (DMN). The Default Mode Network is responsible for our incessant and neurotic overthinking, which is the cause of so much of our emotional distress.

Doing Breathwork exercises, followed by regular breathing, allows us to enter more easily into a meditative state. And meditation has a host of benefits, both physical and mental. It helps us develop inner happiness, ease anxiety, reduces stress, enhances self-awareness, improves focus, teaches us to tune into our intuition, and so much more.

Try Breathwork free – get your 7 day free trial of The Breath Portal!

3. Releases Emotional Trauma

There are several ways in which Breathwork helps us to release trauma and “stuck” emotions in the body.

The Sympathetic Nervous System is activated during “fight or flight” scenarios. In the modern world, this could be due to a meeting with your boss, an unexpected bill arriving, or a fight with your spouse. Situations that aren’t life threatening at all still stimulate this response. And the average person feels this trigger on quite a frequent basis.

Couple that with a society in which we are literally taught to suppress our emotions from a young age, and you’ve got a problem. Stressful situations, anger, trauma. That time you were bulled in 4th grade. These remain stuck in our body’s emotional center. That’s why we become triggered or offended so easily – someone has rubbed up against a memory that we’ve stored in the body.

Breathwork aids in releasing trauma through essentially detoxing the body’s emotional center. As feelings arise and come up to the surface during Breathwork, we practice actually feeling them. This allows them to move through us and out of the body, verses suppressing them.

In this way, Breathwork also teaches us to create separation from ourselves and our emotions and thoughts. By practicing observing our emotions and thoughts, we come to realize they are not us. We are the observer.

This makes Breathwork a radical form of self empowerment.

4. It Accelerates Self Healing

In our natural state, we are a self-healing human.

Our natural state being the state we are in when we are not worried, stressed, overwhelmed. When our body is in rest and relaxation mode, the Parasympathetic Nervous System is active. This is the state where our body aids in healing itself.

Luckily, we have access to modern medicine today in order to assist with our body’s natural healing process. What a blessing!

Still, though, between 70-90% of doctor visits are actually due to stress. And frequently, the treatment involves even more suppression of our emotions.

Meditation is actually the part of Breathwork that causes the body to enter the Parasympathetic Nervous System mode. But Breathwork helps clear the way to make this a much better experience.

Regular meditation slowly trains the mind to relax. It trains us to release our immediate responses to external triggers, that shoot us into fight or flight mode. This means our body remains in recovery mode more of the time. This means…we heal.

5. It Makes Us Happy

Last but not least, Breathwork majorly aids in happiness.

And not just during or immediately following a session. Although, that is normally a time of great bliss.

This type of happiness can’t be bought. It’s the kind where we learn to generate it on our own. Breathwork trains us in awareness positioning, which allows us to see that outside circumstances are not the cause of our pain. It teaches us to transcend beyond our triggers, so that we can learn to let them go. We shift our brain mechanism, which is the cause of our negative thought patterns.

Not only that, but the latest neuroscience shows that the most effective way to wire our brain for happiness is to practice activating the “enlightenment circuit” of the brain. Breathwork and meditation are two activities that engage this circuit.

This leads to the feeling of bliss and “oneness”. Slowly, we learn to make those feelings habitual, verses our anger and stress.

And that, my friend, is why Breathwork is so incredibly powerful.

Ready to give it a try? Join a group journey or book a private session here.