Paying attention to your breath

Our breath is the template for all movement in life. Every movement we make affects the breath and vice versa. It is fundamental to everything we do in life, yet for something so important (it literally sustains us!), we give it very little attention and awareness.

No one taught us how to breathe, it’s our birth right. We just know how. Inhale, exhale. Repeat. But it’s only when we begin to pay attention to this life sustaining force, that we notice how responsive the breath is.

It responds to everything we do. If we run, the breath picks up to support us on our run, if we laugh it will recalibrate. If we lie still and relax, the breath adjusts, slows down and deepens.

Listening to the breath attunes us to what we are doing in the present moment and can help to anchor us to the present. Attentiveness to breath is almost like attentiveness to a child. Paying kind attention to it helps to level out and calm down the breath, making the interaction more enjoyable.

The main issue with not paying attention to the breath is that it might get caught in a particular pattern - the breath is responsive to how we feel mentally and physically after all. That pattern can then tell our nervous system that there is a threat, activating our stress response. By bringing attention back to the breath and consciously relaxing into a calmer, softer pattern, we become more easeful in our movement and in our interactions.

The breath is our anchor

The breath is our anchor. It can ground us in the body and it can bring us back to the present moment. It’s a free, accessible, never failing way to come back to ourselves.

Awareness of your exhalations will directly communicate with the nervous system and help to regulate it through activation of the body’s rest and digest response. When the parasympathetic nervous system is stimulated through a calm breath, it in turn helps to conserve our energy and enhances the body's ability to heal and recuperate.

Buddhists, yogis and Daoists have known about the power of the breath for years and now science is backing it up. Calm breathing balances oxygen and carbon dioxide levels in the body to create and maintain an alkaline environment. This helps to reduce inflammation, lower heart rate, assists circulation and so on.

Mentally, if you’re feeling anxious, shifting the breath can change our interactions in a positive way and to teach us to wait to respond rather than react. Between the in and out breath there are pauses. If we can rest in the pause, it slows us down and helps us wait and reflect on our reaction.

“In between stimulus and response lies a space. In that space lies our freedom and our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth & our happiness”

~Victor Frankl

Sometimes bringing awareness to our breathing can create anxiety. Meeting yourself and paying attention to yourself can be scary. We’re on the treadmill of life and often we’re too busy to stop and listen. Being busy, stressed and/or anxious IS the reason we should bring awareness to the breath.

We all have 2 spare minutes in the day.

Inhale, exhale. Repeat ♡