FM
Garry Jones relates the importance of breathing on mental and emotional health
and how we can help ourselves feel betterBREATHING
TO FEEL BETTER
A
key method for relieving feelings of depression and
anxiety is centered around breath cycles. Literally all
you will do is breathe. No other requirement.
Do nothing!
Like yoga asana practice and meditation, breathing
practices can have a powerful effect on how you feel, and in dealing
with difficult emotional states like anxiety or depression.
The way you breathe is telling of what is occurring in your mind -
and it requires attention, now. To help alleviate feelings of stress and
worry, focusing on truly opening the capacity of your lungs can bring
great rewards. Everything comes back to your breathing, it’s integral
to life. Here are five steps so you can harness its true power.
- Do you breathe the earth or does
the earth breathe you?
The answer is not a metaphysical one (well, maybe!). The answer
most definitely is an anatomical one. When you ‘expire’ - that is
literally ‘a little death’, which is where the word originates from in
meaning - you expel all of the air from your lungs. To do that, you
create a vacuum in your lungs and the air pressure inside of you
becomes lower than that outside of you. A simple law of physics
follows and because the air outside (the Earth’s atmosphere) is
now of higher pressure than that inside of your lungs, the air rushes
in. You don’t so much ‘breathe in’ as ‘receive in’. This really is an
important point. To live, you receive air by creating the space inside
of you to let it in. The Earth breathes us.
The first thing you do when you escape the comfort of your
mother’s womb is breathe in. You ‘inspire’. You take in pure air or
spirit. It is one of the most traumatic examples in our life where we
are unable to breathe, temporarily. The last thing you do as you leave
this world is breathe out. You expire. Neither of these acts requires
conscious control of what we are doing. Not a conscious decision.
They just happen.
If you let go, as you do when you expire, you will then receive, the
Earth breathing you. Focusing on breathing at capacity will directly
increase the amount you can receive as you are creating space for
new, more healthy, useful breaths. Letting go to receive can be
applied to your thoughts, objects and people. Decluttering your
lungs in this sense allows you to receive things that serve you well;
the same goes for your mind, heart and home.- Breathe consciously to change
your body/brain chemicals
The subconscious is normally in charge of your breathing; it responds
to your feelings and emotions. Changing the ratio of breathing out
to breathing in alters body/brain chemicals and in turn alters your
thoughts, emotions and feelings.
You can gain control of your mood and emotions by altering body
chemicals such as endorphins, dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin - if
you learn how. The most obvious example of this experience is when
you exercise. Changing your breathing rates and balance of CO2 and
oxygen will also change your brainwave patterns. I will refrain from
going too deeply into this fascinating subject here, but it’s certainly
something well worth exploring.
You remember the advice of counting to 10 when you got angry as
a child; the better advice would have been to control your breathing.
Generally, when you count to 10 you hold your breath! This gives
your brain a chance to alter its chemical response and change your
thoughts or feelings.