Breaking Down Breathwork and its Benefits
For thousands of years, Eastern medicine has used breathwork to calm the body and the mind, but what does breathwork mean exactly? It’s all about using techniques that intentionally channel and focus your breath, and it’s an incredibly accessible wellness practice for anyone. Most of us live busy lives, and our minds tend to keep up—thinking about the past, worrying about the week ahead, trying to balance everything—and all of this mind-racing can easily lead to the activation of stress hormones. When we so often carry stress, this has physical and emotional impacts on health.
This stress can manifest through aches and pains, headaches, and high blood pressure. It can also cause insomnia, digestive problems, and muscle tension among other issues. Chronic stress, simply put, wears us down. It can weaken our immune systems. But breathwork can provide a stress reduction technique to bring us back to the present and within our bodies. One of the many things all this tension can do is cause us to exist in a fight-or-flight status far too frequently. While we need our sympathetic nervous system to respond that way in certain situations, there’s no need for our bodies to be living in that mode on a regular basis.
In contrast, breathwork taps into our parasympathetic nervous system which is the part of the brain responsible for relaxing your body after those periods of stress or danger that trigger us. Through any number of possible breathwork techniques, we can pull ourselves out of states of deep stress toward a more restful state. We can connect with our breathwork anywhere, making it so useful to have as a tool in your back pocket.
Breathwork is commonly associated with yoga, meditation, and therapy, so it’s possible you already have experience without being aware. These practices focus on bringing us to the present moment to commune better with ourselves, aligning perfectly with the aims of breathwork. If you’re interested in learning more about breathwork techniques at Menari, Recalibrate, Reiki & Sacred Sound sessions, or our upcoming Meditation workshop are all great opportunities to practice this new skill and connect further with our selves, fostering positive and (through consistent practice) long-lasting change in how our body processes our day-to-day lives and any of the stress it comes with.
—Written by: Annie Lindeberg, MFA Creative Writing, & Menari Blogger