The Beginner’s Guide to
Innerstanding the Breath
Innerstand that breath is life. Life begins and ends with the breath. Your breath connects your spiritual body with your physical body bringing them into unison. There is nothing more important than the ever-present breath of life.
So why is the breath so important?
The first step to innerstanding its importance is to define breathwork. Breathwork is a series of breathing exercises and techniques used to improve mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. Because you take your breath with you everywhere, there is no place you go, or anything you do where your breath isn’t with you. When you focus on your breathing, it allows you to be present in the moment so you can fully feel what comes with that moment. Remember that feeling is healing. Life is meant to be emotional, that’s why we have emotions – to feel them. It is important to understand that we won’t like every emotion that we feel, but it is just as important to process emotions we don’t like as it is to process emotions we do like.
Breathwork allows you to process emotions in a healthy way. This means when you come across an emotion you don’t like, you can use breathwork to guide you through that emotion so you can get back to emotions you do want to feel.
Always, always innerstand it’s ok to feel the way you do, even if no one else understands you.
Your feelings are valid regardless of whether anybody else understands them or not. Sometimes it’s going to be your fault for feeling the way you do, while other times it’s going to have nothing to do with you and could be external things over which you have no control.
In either scenario, you have to feel and process those emotions to get through them. Breath equals intellect/thought which means when you aren’t breathing properly, you’re not thinking properly. Most of us breathe incomplete, shallow, fragmented, or broken up breaths. When our breath is fragmented, our thoughts become fragmented. For this reason, your thoughts may seem all over the place, and not make sense or why you may be forgetting things easily. When you slow your breath, and breathe deep; completely inhaling and exhaling, you are able to have more complete thoughts that make sense and improve your memory.
This leads to the emotion part of breathwork.
When we are not breathing properly, we are not able to innerstand how we truly feel, because thoughts eventually turn into feelings. Broken thoughts eventually turn into broken feelings. It is important to innerstand how water and the foods we eat affect our emotions. For example, when we can’t process how we feel, we tend to eat heavy, dense, or processed foods to stagnate and stop the flow of emotions that we don’t know how to feel or don’t want to feel. This is a setup for disaster. This method of coping can lead to disease, because we are filling our bodies with toxic crap in order for us not to process our emotions. Under all the waste our bodies have stored, including in and on our organs, when we detox to release the toxicity, we also will release those unprocessed trapped emotions, which is why we ate those toxic foods in the first place. One might call this emotional vomit. Emotional vomit is the emotive equivalent to throwing up because of drinking too much alcohol and it doesn’t sit right on your stomach so you eventually throw that shit up. It will be the same with your emotions. Breathwork causes you to feel all those emotions you suppressed.
The Food Connection
Food can be linked more to “eating to numb emotions we don’t want to feel” rather than actually eating for nutrition. In my opinion, eating for nutrition is a fallacy: food is really meant for entertainment purposes more than anything, but that’s a whole other conversation for a different day. (Feel free to contact me directly to dive into a deeper conversation about that.) We eat foods that relate to how we feel in our current (mental or physical) state, because when we chew certain foods we are looking to taste or feel a certain texture, and we have a tendency to relate said texture to how we are feeling in that particular moment. When we taste and feel that texture, we are able to crush that emotion for the current moment. This is a never ending process, because we eventually keep coming back to that food, just like a drug. Because we don’t process the emotions, we just use food to numb them.
This is why we don’t eat raw foods such as fruits and veggies when we are emotional because those foods have a high water content, and as previously mentioned, emotions are like water. Therefore, those foods allow our emotions to continue to flow. Unfortunately, we typically will turn to cooked and dehydrated foods that are sure to idle our emotions and stop us from feeling in that moment. Innerstand heavy and dense foods that have a low water content affect us by sitting in the gut turning into waste, such as plaque and toxins, compromises and prevents us from being able to breathe properly. The result is your compromised emotions preventing you from being able to fully feel and be present in life. Innerstand the deeper you get into breathwork, the more you practice it, the less cravings you will have for toxic foods, because you will see how they affect your breathing as you become more present with yourself and surroundings. Remember breathwork is work. Breathwork can, and at times will, get very intense and emotional. When this happens, you must push through these difficult times in order to become the person that you want to be. You are enough, you are worth it, and you deserve it.
Let’s Explore
Breath Practices
There will be three breath exercises you will be learning. You will most likely get lightheaded during these exercises due to the overabundance of oxygen into the brain. It’s ok. Do not panic, continue to focus on the breath and relax. Also be mindful that you may get a cramp in a specific place as well. This is the breath showing you where the weakness/blockage is in your body, and this area needs some work done on it.
Techniques
Diaphragmatic Breathing
Breathe in through your nose and exhale through your mouth. This exercise is simple just to get you familiar with the breath and what it actually feels like to be breathing consciously. You can do these anytime you start to feel out of alignment with yourself to bring yourself back to the present. This can be done anywhere. For this session of breathing, you want to do 3 sets of 20-30 reps of inhales/exhales. One complete inhale and exhale is one rep. In other words, one complete breath.
Breathalizer
This exercise will get a lot more intense. For this exercise, you will only focus on exhales and allow the inhales to happen naturally. I refer to this exercise as dog panting. Very quick exhales as fast as you can, like you are sprinting/running with your breath. For a session of this technique, you want to do 3 sets of 20-30 reps as well. This breath exercise is good to cleanse the blood of toxins, pick up your energy when you are feeling depleted, and it also helps to eliminate food cravings as well.
Tummo Breathing
This exercise is used for healing and relaxation. This exercise switches you from the sympathetic (fight or flight) nervous system to the parasympathetic (rest & digest) nervous system. This exercise is very simple. You will first exhale as deep as you can. Try and pull your belly button in to your spine, or as far back as you can. Once you can’t exhale anymore, you will hold and apply “the locks”. The locks will be listed below in the extra tips section. Your aim is to hold for as long as you can. However, when just beginning, you want to start off with the hold for around 10-15 secs. Once you can’t hold any longer, release the locks and inhale as deep as you can pushing your belly and diaphragm out. Once you fully inhale, hold and apply the locks as well on the inhale too, just like on the exhale. Eventually you will want to hold for as long as you can but just starting out aim to hold for around 10-15 secs just like on the exhales.Then repeat. That’s it, that is tummo breathing. This exercise is really good before you go to bed to relax the body into a goodnight sleep. It is also good to use for healing specific organs in the body. Each organ has a specific time clock where it is most active. This is when you would want to do these at that specific time depending on which organ is damaged and needs regeneration. For a session on this technique, you want to do one set of 18 reps.
Extra Tips
Positions for breathwork
- Sitting on the edge of a chair is best (if it is a hard surface), spine erect, and hands on your knees.
- Sitting on floor criss-cross or butterfly
- Lying on the ground on your back
Locks
When you lock certain parts of your body, in order to keep your inner Chi (energy) inside your body. Locks are only held on exhale or inhale holds. You hold the locks for as long as you hold the exhale/inhale. You do not lock when you are instantly going from an exhale to inhale or inhale to exhale.
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- Anal Lock/Root Lock: For men squeeze and clinch your anus and gooch. For women squeeze and clinch your anus and vagina.
- Abdominal Lock: This lock is only applied on the exhale. Once you completely exhale, squeeze and clinch your abdomen as if you were bracing for someone is about to strike you in the stomach.
- Throat Lock: Tuck your chin as if you were looking to slightly stretch the back of your neck.
- Tough Lock: Apply your tongue to the upper front part of your mouth. It should feel natural as if it was designed for your tongue to be there, because it is.
- Eye Lock: Close your eyes and look up as if you are looking into your third eye/pineal gland.
Location
Make sure you are in a quiet, comfortable place away from distractions when you are doing a full breath session, including placing your phone on Do Not Disturb or turned completely off.
Sound
Do your breath sessions in silence or while listening to music at a level not to exceed 432hz.
Intent
Set an intention for the breathwork. What is the reason for the breathwork session? What would you like to get out of the breathwork session?
Visualize
Use a blindfold or something to cover your eyes. Breath sessions are also used to create and manifest the life that you want. Therefore, you need to go to the darkness. Everything was created from nothingness, so if you want to create something that is not in your life yet, you must go to the nothingness from which all creation stems.
Focus
Last, but not least, be gentle with yourself as everything takes work. Nothing is perfect, the only perfection is imperfection. Consistency beats everything.