The Breathing Book: Good Health and Vitality Through Essential Breath Work

To become a welcome vessel for the breath is to live life without trying to control, grasp, or push away. And how easy is this? The process of breathing is the most accurate metaphor we have for the way that we personally approach life, how we live our lives, and how we react to the inevitable changes that life brings us.

Chest breathers often experience a chronic, free-floating state of anxiety.

Relax your jaw, throat, and tongue and let your facial muscles drop as if impersonating a basset hound.

This pause is a well, a resource that is always available to you. Know that at any time when you feel tired or confused, hurried or overwhelmed, you can draw from this well for rest and replenishment simply by entering the pause at the end of the exhalation.

As you work through the patterns try not to be critical of yourself. Let your new awareness of your breathing be cause for celebration.

They included but were not limited to fatigue, exhaustion, heart palpitations, rapid pulse, dizziness and visual disturbances, numbness and tingling in the limbs, shortness of breath, yawning, chest pain, a feeling of a lump in the throat, stomach pain, muscle pains, cramps and stiffness, anxiety, insomnia and nightmares, impairment of concentratio

The breath was seen as a force that ran through mind, body, and spirit like a river running through a dry valley giving sustenance to everything in its course.

“Deaccelerate” some of your activities. Your breathing will mirror the rate at which you do things.

focus on increasing your exhalation, breathing slow and low into your abdomen, and allowing your shoulders and chest to relax. Make sure you are breathing through your nose.