Breathing and Your Life

If you’ve come this far, I’ll assume you have a profound understanding on the importance of breathing. If you didn’t, you might have died a long time ago.

In fact, it’s such a deeply ingrained skill at this point that you may never even think about it.

The magic of breathing consciously is that breath is the most accessible to have an impact on our nervous system.

Most of our autonomic nervous system functions (digestion, blood circulation, heartrate, etc.) are involuntary. Breathing, however, is unique amongst these functions because of our ability to change our breathing at will with relative ease.

In a fortunate turn of events, we can direct our breathing with intention in such a way that we can consciously down-regulate an autonomic nervous system response from this one lever.

If I can consciously slow down my breath, I can eventually slow my heart-rate and potentially even bring my brain to a state where it can access different modes like focus and forgiveness that are unavailable from a state of fear, anger, or grief (to give only a few examples of emotions that override these functions.