Happy World Breathing Day! 😊❤️ You know how much I love using the breath to regulate the nervous system. It's a beautiful tool that allows us to anchor to the present moment when our minds flutter away. One that allows us to alter our bio chemistry, our heart rhythm patterns, our brainwave activity. And one super accessible to each and every human being! Knowing the basics and fundamentals allows you to take this naturally occurring process, and utilize it to create states based on what YOU need, in the moment. Sometimes we need to upregulate our nervous system (NS) and activate our sympathetic NS to energize the body, get more focused, and/or prepare for physical activity and exertion. Other times we need to down regulate the nervous system and activate more of our parasympathetic NS so that we can wind down in the evening, get our digestion going, calm ourselves in states of heightened stress, or perhaps ground and center ourselves when having disagreements/arguments. Returning to breathing, whenever we inhale, we immediately activate more of that fight-or-flight sympathetic NS. As we exhale, we activate more of the rest-and-digest parasympathetic. This happens in each and every breath cycle. Extend the inhale, making it longer than the exhale, you'll upregulate the nervous. Extend the exhale, making it longer than the inhale, you'll downregulate the nervous. Breathe at a ratio of 1 : 1 and you'll experience a focused and alert, but calm and grounded state (e.g. box breathing). There's a time and place for ALL of these different patterns, and we'll cover a lot of them, but simply having this knowledge as you do now, you can start to play with it and individualize things for yourself. Don't worry, much more to come =) I will start running some guided breathing sessions via Zoom and will be sending links out starting this week! If you haven't yet, also join the Nervous System Regulation group where we'll go much deeper into all things breathwork related along with many other tools, practices, and lifestyle strategies to better learn to self regulate 😎 https://community.guidely.com/groups/TOMJASINSKI2

Posted by Tom - NeuroArkitect Guide at 2022-04-11 18:31:59 UTC