Check previous parts for important information.
Breathing Therapy – Pt. 1
We generally do not think about breathing. But it is one of our most important processes. If you do not breath, you die.
In the beginning God breathed into man’s nostrils the “breath of life”.
There is more to breathing than just sustaining life. It can be a health promoter. If you breathe incorrectly, you will negatively affect your health. If you breathe right, you can positively affect your health. Some of our health problems are related to bad breathing. Some of our health problems are unnecessarily prolonged by bad breathing. It is the breath of life.
When you think about it, you know that your emotional state affects your breathing. If you are scared, you breathe faster and tend toward hyperventilation. While few of us are involved in chronic hyperventilation, a majority of modern people are involved in chronic hypoventilation, not taking in enough air. We tend to breathe shallow.
[I will be using shallow breathing and such to mean hypoventilation in the following discussion, and fast breathing to mean hyperventilation.]
Most of us know that our emotional state affects our physical health. For centuries people have known when someone is sick it is helpful to cheer him up. The ancient Chineses even took this truth to the point of pointing out which organs or affected by which emotions. Then they would treat problems with counter emotion to the problem ones.
I read in my studies of qigong about posture and emotions. Your posture changes too with different emotions. So they have you correct your posture and the emotion changes in concert.
That is sort of like smile therapy. If you smile for a period of time your mood brightens. That is well documented in psychological literature.
Well how does that apply to breathing? If you start breathing right, also you can alter your emotional state. When you are upset, how many times have you had someone tell you take a deep breath? And you know if you take a few deep breaths you begin to calm down.
This is one reason why I am a strong proponent of a little autogenic coaching to be a add on to any healing modality. It gets you to breathe deeply for a period of time. That alone can relieve stress.
I have written extensively on this in my books on healing hypnosis for non hypnotist healers and my designed system of healing Tele-Nosis. I give a lot of the science there. Here I will say if you reduce stress, any stress, even if you think it is not related to the presenting problem, you heal immediately in some cases and at a minimum speed the healing 40% in other cases on average.
Stress is a killer and de stressing is a healer. The science is in.
If you move from shallow breathing to deep breathing, you tend to destress. You are putting yourself in a better position to heal. Sometimes that of itself will heal you.
Master Yin Shi is a case in point. He started out life sickly and developed tuberculosis in his twenties. Tuberculosis during those days was a death sentence.
What he did was start to meditate, which involved deep breathing. And he in time conquered the disease. If someone is all upset about a sickness, they move more into shallow breathing. Shallow breathing is also noted with stress.
Good advice might be to take a deep breath. [And by that I mean change your breathing to deep breathing.] That is too simple. But let us look at some scientific truths.
When we shallow breathe, science has now established that the oxygen attaches more tightly to the hemoglobin.
And it is more difficult for the cells to receive correct amounts of oxygen. Many physical and psychological maladies are related to too little oxygen.
The first thing that comes to most people’s mind when I say this is hyperbarics. The doctor, when he uses this therapy, puts the people he is treating in an oxygen rich chamber and increase the air pressure.
They are starting to uses this for many and varied issues. They are trying to force into the body more oxygen because they know oxygen heals many things.
When you deep breath, the oxygen binds more loosely to the hemoglobin and is easier for the cells to receive it. Your cells do not have to struggle to breathe. You can say that the oxygen gained from deep breathing is more bio absorbable in that sense.
You in deep breathing are using less energy to oxygenate your cells. Think of all the cells in your body, millions of them. Now think of all those cell straining to pry the oxygen that has tightly attached to the blood in shallow breathing. Now think of a million cells just naturally receiving loosely bound oxygen.
When you think about one cell, that may not be much energy. But when you think about millions of cells, that is a significant energy depletion from shallow breathing. All that energy has to be redirected from healing to oxygenation. Your health and healing is negatively impacted by shallow breathing and positively affected by deep breathing. You can consciously free up energy for healing by deep breathing.
Energy is not the full story.
… T0 be continued …
