May
4
2009
Release Your Depression with Breath
Author: tayana
In today’s noisy, high-stress world, many of us sit, stand, sleep, speak, act, and move in ways that undermine our breathing and our physical, emotional, and spiritual health. When we look at ourselves in action, when we actually sense and observe ourselves honestly for a moment, we see that we carry enormous amounts of unnecessary tension throughout our bodies. We may sense it in our hands, face, eyes, jaw, tongue, throat, belly, back, chest, and so on (even tension in our feet can undermine our breathing). These tensions can and often do impede the natural, harmonious movement of the diaphragm and its coordination with the secondary breathing muscles. They also impede the harmonious flow of the breath of life through our body/mind.
The first step in healthy breathing is to become conscious of how we actually breathe. From the perspective of the world’s great spiritual traditions, our breath not only brings needed oxygen and other gases to the physical body, but it can also bring, when we are conscious of it, the finer energies (prana, chi, and so on) needed to help nourish our higher bodies–the subtle body, causal body, and so on. Whatever we may believe about our soul and spirit, our breath, and how we breathe, is intimately connected with all aspects of our being
We can do all the breathing exercises in the world, but if we don’t begin to see and free ourselves from the unnecessary tensions that we carry day in and day out–if we are unable to find a state of dynamic relaxation in the midst of daily living–these exercises won’t do much good. In fact, without such relaxation and without real self-knowledge and self-awareness, breathing exercises can often exacerbate the tensions already present and create dangerous biochemical and physiological imbalances in our body/mind.
