THE POWER OF BREATH IN YOGA
In the hustle and bustle of daily life, I've noticed how easy it is to forget the most fundamental aspect of our existence: breathing. While we all understand that breathing is vital for life, few of us realize the profound impact that conscious, optimal breathing can have on our overall well-being. At Yoga Creative, we're dedicated to rediscovering the art of breathing and leveraging its transformative powers to enhance every aspect of our lives.
Breath: The Key to Holistic Healing
Our bodies take over 20,000 breaths each day, yet most of these breaths are shallow, unconscious, and far from their optimal efficiency. This realization struck me hard, highlighting that we're missing out on 20,000 opportunities to heal, rejuvenate, and empower ourselves every single day. Optimal breathing goes beyond merely sustaining life; it can improve sleep, digestion, immune and respiratory functions, reduce blood pressure, and alleviate anxiety. It's a simple yet profoundly effective tool for mental, physiological, and emotional self-regulation.
The Jojo Approach to Breathwork
At Yoga Creative, I integrate breathwork into every yoga class, both through flowing movement and meditative stillness. By doing so, I aim to unlock the full healing potential of your yoga practice.
Our bodies operate most efficiently when in a state of balanced flow between action and relaxation. In modern life, we can get stuck in a state of chronic stress that is toxic to this balance. This manifests in our breath as short, shallow, fast, mouth, chest inhales and exhales. This in turn stimulates the stress response, a self-perpetuating cycle.
I teach longer, deeper, slower, nasal, abdominal breathing that stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system. With practice, I’ve found that just 60 seconds of this breathwork is enough to profoundly change how one feels.
Transformative Benefits of Breathwork
Breath is a reflection of our entire physiological, mental and emotional state. Think about what happens to your breath when you laugh, cry, feel pain or fear, when you are happy or excited, when you feel stress. Breath is connected to every emotion, to our brain, to our lungs, to our nervous system, to our heart.
Meta research points to the benefits of this optimal breathwork: reducing anxiety and felt sensations of pain; lowering heart rate and calming racing thoughts; increasing memory function; improving sleep quality; improving sexual function; affecting our ability to lose weight; increasing the optimal take up of oxygen circulated to our brain heart and lungs; restoring balanced flow between action and rest in our nervous system.
Our breath is a gift we are born with, it’s our most intimate guide, a mirror to inner wellbeing. But because it is mostly involuntary, an unconscious action, in daily life we don’t tend to think about it much. And most people are not doing it right. We seem to have lost the art of breathing.
Join us at Yoga Creative on this great adventure to discover the healing power of breath!