Breathwork to Help You Heal

We’ve all heard the saying, “let food be thy medicine”. But what about the Breath as medicine?

In these times of abundant information at the touch of a button, it can be a challenge to stay up to date with the latest, scientific discoveries.

Wim Hof, James Nestor, Patrick McKeown, and Ed Harrold, to name a few of the top breath instructors in the World at this time, are all saying the same thing...

Your Power, Your Healing, Your Destiny, is in your Breath.

Taking a mindful approach on how you breathe -  faster, slower, deeper, quieter, through one nostril, then the other, holding, retaining, stopping - there are literally hundreds of ways to do it.

None of this is entirely new, of course. Pranayama is the practice of focusing on the breath, and is a main component of yoga. In the East, they have known since forever that the way we breathe controls everything - from our health, sports performance, academic performance, to our chemistry, thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and even our perceptions.

All of it.

Right there, under our noses.

Nose breathing.

Like so many things, we are not breathing consciously. Barely even aware of how or what we’re doing in terms of our breath, let alone considering we need to be taught or shown how to do it properly. We just do it subconsciously, right?

Many of us (maybe up to 50%) are barely breathing through our noses - a special apparatus that filters, changes chemistry, detoxifies, and builds the diaphragm.  There are so many reasons to ensure that you and your kids are breathing through the nose, it’s beyond belief that in the West we have been unaware of this. Until now.

Now you know it, you can’t un-know it. Nose breathing is the only way you can properly achieve optimum health, and prevent disease further down the line. I bet even since you started reading this article you’ve realised you’ve got your mouth open all the time?

Mouth breathing puts your blood pressure up, puts you into stress modes, means that nothing is getting properly filtered going in, and that your actual breathing apparatus is shrinking. Not using it, so losing it.

In a nutshell, our breath is our connection to life. 

Do it through your nose and do it as slowly as you can. You can and will notice monumental differences in your health and happiness.

Long, slow, quiet, and deep breaths through your nose - practise this every day until your body is retrained.

I highly recommend this beautiful book, ‘Life With Breath’ by Ed Harrold. It’s easy to read and there’s a 30 day programme to practise.

“Ed Harrold's Life With Breath IQ + EQ = NEW YOU is a journey in discovering the mind-body relationship that is linked through breath and how this serves as a basis for reducing stress and anxiety, improving health and well-being, building resilience, improving performance, AND transforming negative habitual patterns of behavior.

A Life With Breath provides the reader with an explanation on how and why breathing is so essential to our health and well-being.  Armed with new scientific research and knowledge, we begin to provide tools and strategies for mindfully breathing throughout the day.  The reader learns a breathing practice and mindfulness practice daily to start them on the road of living a “life with breath.”  The breathing exercises in the book begin retraining the body with healthful breathing rates and patterns strengthening the parasympathetic nervous system, diaphragm muscle, phrenic nerve, vagus nerve along with communication between the heart and brain.”