"As long as you are breathing there is more right with you than wrong with you, no matter what is wrong."
- Jon Kabat-Zinn, MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress
Reduction)
Your Breath is Your Life
The importance of breathing and retraining dysfunctional breathing cannot be understated because breathing is fuel for the brain.
This starts with regulating your breathing techniques and being aware of how breath impacts everything.
Your breathing habits are deeply grooved in the automated part of the nervous system and while they’re keeping you alive at the moment, they may not be helping you sleep or move well, and could be part of the muscular pain you have.
Poor breathing habits can also lead to further chronic conditions and disease - first and foremost, stress, anxiety, poor sleep, high blood pressure and heart disease (as well as low back pain, jaw pain TMJ) are critically linked to dysfunctional breathing patterns.
Breathing is all about becoming aware first and then shifting habits slowly with repetition.
This may sound counterintuitive, but it’s quite possible that you’re breathing too much. In fact, one in ten people suffers from this disorder, and some don’t even know it. When you breathe too much, it reduces oxygen to all areas of your body (including cells, tissues, and organs) along with impacting the natural levels of gasses (oxygen and carbon dioxide) in your bloodstream. This is important because breathing too much constricts your muscles, blood vessels, and airways which leads to all kinds of health problems.
This is why it’s important to normalize your breathing volume using specific techniques like switching from mouth to nose breathing.
Most people, including you, likely have some type of dysfunctional breathing going on. Because we've adapted to our learned breathing patterns (remember the brain learns through repetition), we don't often pay attention to our breath and lucky for us, it is happening automatically.
Often you’re so used to breathing too much or too fast, that it feels normal, but it’s not.
When your breathing becomes dysfunctional it will negatively impact your health and wellness. This can lead to, or be the main contributor of varied symptoms or chronic conditions like:
- Fatigue and weakness
- Poor memory recall and difficulty concentrating
- Abdominal cramping and bloating
- Chest pain
- Reduced pain tolerance
- Muscle spasms and cramping
- Disturbed sleep and sleep disorders
- Snoring & sleep apnea
- Overuse injury
- Tension and anxiety
- Yawning and sighing throughout the day
- Poor posture
- Brain fog
Breath retraining is simply a holistic way of improving your health so that you can continue to practice this on your own and feel better in all your activities of daily living.
These breathing tools and techniques will help you improve your focus, anxiety/stress, and other chronic conditions like asthma, sleep disorders, heart conditions, and COPD.
Breath training will improve sport performance and activities of daily living.
Through repetition, the brain will learn healthy patterns and your symptoms will decrease and this can truly be life-changing: physically, mentally, and emotionally.
These breathing exercises and explorations can directly help relieve:
- TMJ and muscle tension in the jaw
- Neck tension
- Snoring, insomnia, and sleep apnea
- Poor breathing patterns and habits
- Stress, anxiety, and tension
- Posture and back issues
- Help strengthen and re-map functional diaphragm movement (a deep core stabilizer) and when you have back pain, this is an important part of recovery
- Hyperventilation disorders
- Unexplained breathlessness and breathing discomfort
- Asthma and chronic lung complaints
- Lethargy, fatigue, and lack of energy
Better Breathing for Life
When any of these symptoms and solutions resonate with you, I invite you to explore Better Breathing for Life.
Ease in Motion Functional & Integrative Breath Training is a holistic approach to helping you experience more ease and flow in your life.
Improve your health, your work environment, and/or your sport. Pick a focus that suits you.
Whether you're experiencing pain, searching for a way improve your health or navigating a health challenge, Better Breathing for Life is a space to explore a whole new approach to functional breathing.
Functional means relating to the way something works or operates; this course is designed to be practical and useful for the rest of your life.
Better Breathing for Life is an integrative approach. This means I teach with the intention to unify separate things.
The breath is controlled by your brain, like all your nervous system movements and functions in your body.
The breath affects us mentally, emotionally, and physiologically, so we need to take a ‘whole-person' approach and work from brain-centered learning.