Your Breath and What it Knows About You

As mentioned in the previous blog, you’ll always have your body, and your breath. As you know, the breath is that strangely involuntary (and yet somewhat voluntary) chronic movement within you. It sustains you, but it is also something you are in relationship with, whether you know it or not. Your breath is carrying a lot of information about you! And as in all relationships there is a communication that occurs between the two entities: you being one and your breath being the other.

A professional once pointed out the way in which I frequently “held my breath.” She meant that I continuously limited my intake of air by breathing shallowly into my chest and holding my stomach in or tightly. This prevented a fuller expansion of the diaphragm, and therefore limited the oxygen I could receive, and the amount of time carbon dioxide could stay in my body. It was related to the health issue for which I was seeking her attention.

You may be aware of the science and attention that has developed around breathing. Books and techniques are coming out of the woodwork! Some you can find on my Resources page. There are many breathing programs and methods of breathing to help you maximize the effectiveness of your breathing and overall health. This is important, no doubt!

First, for our purposes, we simply want to understand ourselves - and therefore our breath - better. Instead of trying to dominate and control your breathing to make it more effective or a better instrument in your body, I recommend taking time to understand it as it is now. Your breath has come to function in the way that it does for a reason (likely many reasons), and there’s powerful information to be gained in listening to it, understanding it where it is.

How to get to know your breath

This takes a technique popular in Mindfulness and other meditative traditions called noticing. You learn to simply notice your breath without trying to change it, without making any judgements about whether it’s good or bad. Many mindfulness practices have this built in, and in fact, focusing on the breath is often a first step to learning how to become more mindful and create more awareness of your body and your mind. Overtime, as you pay attention, you ‘see’ it better, know and understand it better. And, in a way, fall in love with it. This is your breath, a life source for you, and something that is so intimately connected to your emotional life that it both responds and leads at times.

As you notice your breath, you’ll begin to understand better what it’s communicating. It’s another method of being cued into when you’re feeling safe (social engagement zone) or ill-at-ease or anxious (sympathetic response) or terrified (dorsal vagal response). It is possible that as you grow this skill, you’ll realize you may be feeling anxious or even frozen in fear more often than you thought. And then you act from that place of fear. This would be a marvelous discovery! For then we can learn how to regulate back to ease and social engagement, and act out of confidence and grounded-ness.

Steps for noticing your breathing

1) Find a quiet space, free of distraction

2) Get into a comfortable position, and take a moment to relax into it (don’t force relaxation, just let it come, to what ever extent possible)

3) Slowly and repeatedly turn your attention or your mind’s eye to your breath

4) Resist the urge to change it or make a judgement about it

5) Simply notice for a few minutes what your breath is like: how it feels to breathe (through your nose, into your lungs, in your stomach, in the rest of your body), what kind of breaths they are (short, long, deep, shallow)

Start small and successfully! Make this a habit at the easiest time of the day for no more than the amount of time you can commit to. The length of the time you do this matters far less than number of times you do it. That is, if you simple slow down and notice your breath for one minute in the morning and one minute in the afternoon, and then slowly increase the number of times you do this throughout the day, you’ll have already accomplished the first and major hurdle to becoming more connected to and grounded in your own body and breath.

More on breathing to come! For now, cheers to spending one-minute intervals throughout the day getting to know this incredible power within you.