What is breathwork?
There’s a million different types of breath. We have preconceived ideas of what breathwork is: that it’s a part of yoga, or a meditation practice but the reality is there are so many ways to practice breathwork, and so many techniques for applying it to your life.
If someone tells you “this is the way, this is the technique that will save your life” RUN FOR THE HILLS. It’s not true. There’s so many different ways to harness your breath and use breathwork to impact your body, emotions and whole life.
Like exercise, there’s no one right way, we have different goals, different outcomes.
With breathwork it’s about learning the techniques to use at the right times to help us in that moment.
There’s breathwork for energy, there’s breathwork for calming, there's breathwork for sports performance. All of these amazing applications are all powerful and transformative, which is why I love it so much.
It’s about learning what to do when you need more energy, when you need more calm, or how to improve your sports performance. When we learn the techniques we can start to apply breathwork to our daily lives.
Think of it in terms of the steps you would normally take when you set yourself the goal to be healthy. In my world, and probably in your world, when someone wants to get healthy, often their first goal is to join the gym and eat better and we start there.
But, if we think about the human body: what would be the first thing that would kill us if we didn’t do it? What would happen if you didn’t breathe? If you didn’t drink? Didn’t sleep? Didn’t eat? Didn’t move?
We know how important it is for us to have oxygen. We can live without food or water for days, how long can we live without oxygen?
The way we breathe impacts the way oxygen is delivered to the cells throughout our bodies. It affects every cell, and every emotion.
When we focus our starting point on breathing instead of movement what we’re doing is starting our health journey from a foundational cellular level. The ways we try to get healthier normally start at the wrong end of the spectrum.
We need to be able to focus on the things that matter first.
The things that are the key foundations of health. Because once we start to build on those, just like a pyramid, everything else can start to get better.
It just makes sense.
It's the things that we do often that makes the biggest difference, it’s like driving a ship. If we turn that steering wheel a single degree may not feel like a lot, but over thousands of miles it completely changes the direction. The same goes for the things you do every single day - they make the biggest difference in your life. Start with your breathing.
