Are You Breathing Correctly? Here’s How to Re-Engineer Your Breath
As most people will admit, breathing is essential to life. Those who don’t are simply ignoring reality. All living beings have some type of respiration, including plants, though their respiration is reversed from ours. We take in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide and plants take in carbon dioxide and ‘exhale’ oxygen. This is one of the reasons the world is in an environmental crisis today: human life is depended to maintain the levels of oxygen and CO2 on Earth.
Our life is dependent on a continuous and balanced flow of breath in and out of our bodies. Fortunately for us, the body maintains the flow of breath (through the Autonomic Nervous System) whether we pay attention to it or not. Most of our breaths are unconscious and influenced by the flexibility and strength of our bodies, specifically the situation in the ribs, diaphragm and back.
Most people don’t do anything to actively cultivate the quality or their breath even though it is our most vital function. Thus, most people’s breath, life force and energy are at the mercy of their physical situation and unfortunately, most people’s unconscious breath is imbalanced, strained and unhealthy. Fortunately for us, we can take direct action to change our breath for the better and live more vibrant lives because of it.
If your breathing dynamics are poor, you can be continually deprived of life giving prana which will result in tiredness, increased frequency of illness, exhaustion, lack of enthusiasm and poor mental powers, among many other things. There is a simple solution, don’t despair. All it takes is some dedicated time and attention and a few simple yoga breath practices. Let’s give it a go.
Lay down on your back with a low pillow under your head. Get comfortable and take one hand on your belly. As you consciously inhale, push gently up into your hand and encourage the belly to rise up. This engages and trains the most essential muscle of breath, the diaphragm. As you exhale, let the belly fall away from the hand and sink towards the spine. Give a gentle, muscular draw in with the abdominal muscles. Don’t strain. On inhalation, repeat the movements of the belly. Do this for at least 5 minutes, gradually increasing the time you do it (daily) up to 10 minutes or even longer if you enjoy it.
For the next exercise, we want to train the movement of the ribs and chest. Take your palms onto your front side chest with the fingers pointing towards each other nearly touching the sternum (breast bone). On your inhalation, expand the ribs into the palms and let the chest gently but firmly expand until you reach the comfortable limit of your inhalation. On your exhalation, let the ribs gently move away from the hands with light muscular force, until the exhalation is comfortably finished. Then repeat the same thing for at least 5 minutes and work up to 10 minutes or longer.
If you train yourself in this way, you are teaching your body to breathe properly, using the respiratory muscles with the correct movements. It will take some time to to re-train your breath patterns, but eventually you will find you have more energy, you sleep better and you have more energy in general for the life you want to live. All it takes is a little attention and effort and you will change your life for the better. Good luck!
If you want to learn more about breath, energy, yogic breath practices, energy cultivation and creating better health in you or your students (if you are a yoga teacher), join us on a 200 hour, breath-based yoga training (The Swara Yoga 200 Hour Foundation Course) or on our powerful Prana and Pranayama Module, running every July in Europe.
