3 Powerful benefits of regular breathwork practice
Our breath is always with us and something we do without a lot of thought. However, many of us don’t realise how powerful our breath can be to our health and wellbeing, and leading us to live better lives.
Whether you’re already familiar with the practice or if it’s the first you’ve heard of it, we’re here to define our approach to Breathwork and break down some of the key benefits.
What is Breathwork?
We can define Breathwork as the manipulation of our breath for more controlled, deeper breathing. While there are a few different deep breathing practices, we’ll be focusing on the particular practice of BioDynamic Breathwork Trauma Release System (BBTR).
This practice was developed by Giten Tonkov, and combines connected breathing, movement, sound, bodywork, and meditation, which helps us release trauma and stress from our bodies.
This is an incredibly powerful practice that better connects us with our bodies and can have life-changing benefits for anyone currently dealing with trauma and stress from the past that they’re yet to be able to move on from fully.
Key Benefits of Breathwork
1. Increased self-awareness
Breathing is a necessary function to keep us alive and functioning well, yet it is uncommon for us to pay much attention to it in our day-to-day lives. When we focus on our breath, we become more aware of our body and, therefore, more aware of how it feels and what we need, restoring the connection between our mind and our body.
The greater self-awareness we experience as a result of breathwork better connects us with our emotions, sensations, thoughts and feelings to better enjoy them or deal with them as we’ll discuss in more depth further down.
2. Calms the body
Breathwork helps us calm our minds, which at times can be difficult for us to achieve. Deep intentional breathing slows down our heart rate and blood pressure and increases oxygen flow throughout our cells. Increased oxygen helps energise us and relax us at the same time.
The calming sensation of breathwork also helps us fall asleep and improve our sleep when completed at night.
3. Release trauma and stress
Our breathing becomes restricted and shallow when we experience stress, and often we’re not aware of this and how long it impacts our breathing patterns. Over an extended period of time, restricted breathing can lead to physical and mental ailments.
The deep berating of breathwork suppresses our typical flight-or-flight response to immediately lower our perceived stress and also ease chronic pain and physical discomfort. Moving your body from a stressed state to rest and repair helps heal the body.
Breathwork enables us to reach a deeper state of mind from which we can process buried emotions and pain and then work to let go of them and their negative impact on us.
For those of us that have experienced trauma in the past, it’s common for us to store this in our bodies. Breathwork puts us more in touch with this and gives us the time and space to process our trauma and free ourselves from it.
Exploring breathwork further.
Breathwork can be used day to day and anywhere, anytime to calm yourself and settle into yourself.
Breathwork is a powerful tool for keeping us centred and in good health. Getting started can be as simple as settling down into a comfortable position and taking a deep, intentional breath and repeating the process.
For something seemingly so simple and accessible, it’s okay to be sceptical about its benefits. I was too with my first experience with BBTR, but after a week-long workshop I can truly say it was a life-changing experience that I aspire to introduce to others to share the benefits of the practice.
For anyone looking to use the BBTR practice to better understand how to move on from trauma and stress, we have two Heart Awakening Breathwork & Sound healing workshops coming up in Golden Bay and Otaki.
During these, we walk you through the Breathwork practice, help you process many of the emotions you may have been repressing throughout your life and leave you with tools and practices to maintain a better health and well-being via ongoing breathwork.
If you have any questions, or want more information, I invite you to reach out to me at info@moniquecarmela.com to discuss how we can help in your healing process.
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