Follow our 3 step guide to improve your breath pattern, increase your life force energy and enhance your emotional wellbeing.
Learn to breathe
1. Evaluate your breath
Listen to the breath pattern analysis audio below for a guided discovery of your natural way of breathing. Switch off the outside world and connect with yourself. It’s only by understanding your current breath pattern that can you see where to make changes.
Does any of this sound familiar?
You use your shoulder muscles to breathe
Breathing via your shoulder muscles is exhausting and leads to chronic neck and shoulder pain. We’re going to show you how to use your major breathing muscle – your diaphragm.
You control your exhale
Controlling your exhale is like putting your shopping bags down slowly. It takes way more energy than is necessary. This often indicates a need to control or a fear of letting go.
You clench your jaw or grind your teeth at night
The jaw is connected to the diaphragm via fascia trains under the skin. Clench your jaw right now. It’s much harder to breathe, right? We typically hold anger and resentment in our jaw, and that effects our ability to breathe fully.
You often hold your breath and block your feelings?
Unwanted emotions have an emotional charge. If we don’t express our feelings, they are literally swallowed by the breath and held in the body at a cellular level, resulting in pain and suffering.
You find it difficult being in the present moment
Constantly distracting yourself, always being switched ‘on’ and finding it hard to relax are all possible effects of past trauma. An overloaded nervous system invariably leads to sickness.
2. Improve your breath
Breathe into your whole torso
You can retrain your breath by lying on your back, putting your feet on the floor and placing a hot water bottle on your solar plexus, breathing into it to encourage your diaphragm to work well. Place your hands over the base of your ribcage. Take a deep breath in and feel the expansion and movement in the belly and chest.
Using your diaphragm, draw the breath (feel the movement) down into your belly and up into your chest too. This creates a free flowing ‘barrel breath’ using your whole torso from the pelvis to the collarbone. Breathe here for a while, especially if it feels different and new to you. Diaphragmatic breathing is wonderfully grounding and relaxing. This is how you breathed as a baby.
Check your breath pattern by placing one hand on your stomach, to feel the rise of the belly, and the other hand on your heart, to feel the rise of your chest. Notice if you use your shoulder muscles, rather than your major breathing muscle, your diaphragm, to breathe. Breathing via your shoulder muscles is exhausting and can lead to chronic neck and shoulder pain.
Exhale with a sigh
Controlling your exhale is like putting your shopping bags down slowly. It takes way more energy than is necessary. This often indicates a need to control or a fear of letting go. You may be used to a long, controlled exhale, often practised in yoga or meditation.
If you tend to control your exhale, take a big breath in and hold it for as long as you can. Sip in some more air. Then simply let go of exhale with one short, soft sigh and carry on breathing, noticing how much easier it can be to exhale.
The engineering of the diaphragm means that when you sigh on the exhale — a short and sweet sigh, almost like a soft pant — the muscle simply relaxes or ‘flops’ back into position. It doesn’t need to be controlled.
Relax your jaw
The jaw is connected to the diaphragm via fascia trains under the skin. Clench your jaw right now. It’s much harder to breathe, right? We typically hold anger and resentment in our jaw.
Tightness held in the overworked muscles
of the jaw can be massaged away. Lightly tap around your jaw to find the sore spots, then gently massage to relieve the tension. You can even massage inside the mouth too. Another great way to relax your jaw is to yawn.
Practice these exercises daily to retrain your breath. This is where the rubber hits the road and you start to get results. Stick with it and the benefits include more energy, feeling more connected to your body and more able to manage the emotional rollercoaster of which your breath is a reflection.
Watch the video below for guidance on how to consciously connect your breath. You can then add a regular breathing practice — a bit like going to the gym, building the breathing muscle up and retain the muscle memory, even when you are not conscious of your breath. NB - very helpful in stressful situations to help keep you stable!
3. Retrain your breath
Listen to the audio below and practice daily to retrain your breath pattern. It will work, if you stick with it, it doesn’t work to do one press up! You are at the breath gym! You might hit resistance and the ego does hate to be out of control! The benefits will begin to encourage you with more energy, feeling more connected to your body and more able to manage the emotional rollercoaster of which your breath is a reflection. By practising daily, you’ll become more resilient, self-sufficient and ready to greet and serve the world, showing up as the best version of yourself. Listen to the 8 minute audio below, it will help!