BREATHWORK
If you’ve ever been to a yoga class, you’ve heard an instructor remind you to control your breath. In the ancient yogic teachings, the practice of directing the breath is called pranayama, and it teaches you to breathe consciously, with awareness, and with intent. Within the teachings, there exist many different exercises that can help you tap into your breath as a means of building self-awareness and focus during meditation or yoga.
Today, breathwork has evolved to include many new techniques that focus on the use of breathing exercises as a means of therapy and self-healing. Breathwork is more than an exercise of breathing correctly or with intent. Breathing techniques are tools for major transformation and healing. Breathwork encompasses abroad range of whole-being therapeutic practices and exercises used to relieve mental, physical, and/or emotional tension.
What is breathwork?
You may have been hearing a lot about breathwork recently but unsure just what the fuss is all about. Working with the breath has been my most recent skill that has blown me away (no pun intended!). I had dabbled a bit with Wim Hof breathing and this piqued my interest. If you haven’t heard of Wim, I highly suggest you have a quick look on youtube for some mind-blowing feats of what the human body can do.
why breathwork?
My most recent successes in my own health healing in both body in mind have come from breathwork. Breathwork encompasses working with both how we breathe regularly throughout our day and in sleep, as well as spending time doing daily breathing exercises. Most people are over-stressed which leads to over-breathing, which can cause a whole host of issues, both mentally and physically. Over-breathing can lead to:
Cardiovascular: palpitations, missed beats, tachycardia, sharp or dull atypical chest pain, angina, cold extremities, Raynaud’s disease/phenomenon, blotchy flushing of blush area, capillary vasoconstriction
Neurological: dizziness, instability, feeling faint (but rarely fainting), headache, paraesthesia (numbness, deadness, uselessness, heaviness, pins and needles)
Respiratory: shortness of breath, irritable cough, tightness or oppression of chest, air hunger, inability to take a deep breath, excessive sighing, yawning, sniffing
Muscular: cramps, muscle pains in the next and shoulders, stiffness
Psychic: tension, anxiety, unreal feelings, panic, phobias, agoraphobia
Allergies
Gastrointestinal: difficulty in swallowing, globus (having a lump in your throat), dry mouth and throat, acid regurgitation, heartburn, flatulence, belching, air swallowing, abdominal discomfort, bloating
General: weakness, exhaustion, sub-optimal concentration, impaired memory and performance, disturbed sleep, including nightmares, emotional sweating
*the list above was compiled by Dr. Claude Lum and can be found in the book behavioral and Psychological Approaches to BreathingDisorders by Beverly H Timmonsand Ronald Ley