The Importance of Belly Breathing

So moving on, this week I'd really love to just touch on belly breathing.

This is such a basic topic, I feel, but it's also so powerful and so foundational that I wanted to really highlight it in its own little episode here.

So I've talked a million times in our episodes about belly the belly breath and different types of breathing techniques you can search anything pranayama in my past episodes and I go over a few different ways to do those so if you want to learn some pranayama practices Go back to the archives and I literally go step by step.

There's one that's called like top three breathing practices or something like that.

There's a whole episode on Yujayi breath if you want to learn that one specifically.

There's quite a few different breathwork options for you to do here just on the podcast because I do find breathwork to be probably some of the most important work that we do here.

And so, yeah, I want to share that.

So the importance of the belly breath is huge because paying attention to whether you're breathing just into the chest or actually using your full lung capacity and really using your diaphragm there and pulling that breath all the way down, letting your belly extend out as you inhale is And that type of breath signals to our nervous system a totally different message than what a chest breath does.

And I've talked about that in other episodes.

But again, this is so important.

I think it deserves its own highlight.

literally, if you are feeling anxious and you catch yourself feeling anxious, you know, that's the whole big part of this process in this way of living is your dedication to awareness.

You know, you have to be dedicated to being aware.

And by aware, I mean, watching the self consistently, you know, and so that means that when we're in a tizzy, we actually can figure out, whoa, time out, I'm in a tizzy, and start to unwind that versus being caught in the moment and caught in the reaction and continue running down that runaway freight train of disaster you know and we I think sometimes we're better than other times at catching ourselves you know sometimes it's really easy to be like I'm starting to feel a little anxious or a little bit wound up you know And in those moments, as soon as you do, literally the only thing you have to do is start to take the deep belly breaths.

You don't have to change the mindset.

You don't have to change the story.

You don't have to change your environment.

You don't have to change literally anything except tuning into your breath, taking it over, and bringing it all the way down to your belly button.

Filling from the bottom of the lungs.

letting the ribs cage slowly fill up from the bottom all the way to the top letting those collarbones expand and fill and lift and taking more breath in holding it for a moment and slowly letting it come out from the top of the lungs All the way down through to the belly and pulling the belly in.

Finishing out that exhale.

So I was, if you didn't catch on, I was speaking slowly enough that you could actually be doing that in real time.

So just being able to take over that breath, make it into a very long extended thing like we just did.

and do that repeatedly, and you will instantly feel the change.

You will instantly feel the shift, you know, and then you can start to, then, then and only then, from that place, can you start to maybe change the story, assess the situation, make decisions, decide what it is that you believe, you know, whatever it is.