Breathing is essential to life. Its the first thing we do when we are born, and on average when rested you take about 16 breaths per minute. This means you breath about 960 breaths an hour, 23,040 breaths a day, 8,409,600 a year. How many of those 23,040 a day breaths you take daily are you aware of ?
Learning to breathe consciously, and with awareness, is a life changing tool in helping you to restore balance between the mind and body, as they are intimately connected and influence each other. Our breathing is influenced by our thoughts and our thoughts and physiology can be influenced by our breathing.
When you experience stressful thoughts, anxiety, worry, anger, or have frustration, your breathing comes from the upper chest and it becomes shallow and rapid, which in turn releases hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol increasing your blood pressure and pulse rate.
When we do deeper breathing you can reverse these symptoms instantly and create a sense of calm in the mind and body, which reverses the stress response in the body. As well as reversing the physical stress response in the body, deep breathing can help calm and slow down the emotional turbulence in the mind. Breathing can have an immediate efffect by diffusing emotional energy, so there is less reactivity to our emotions and grounds us to the present moment.
Lissa Pickles 