Breathe for Stress Relief

“And if you know how you breathe when you are in silence, then you can create that state by regulating your breathing in a way that corresponds with silence.
Both mind and breathing are interconnected.”

Osho

Breath is the connection between the mind, the body, the spirit, and the universe.

The first step toward a more peaceful, centered life with less stress and upset is an effective breath practice. Breath practice develops awareness of the connection between the mind and the body. It enables better health, increased mental focus and ultimately a longer more vigorous life.

Our lives are contained between the space of our first breath in and our last breath out.

Breathing occurs without any doing from us. It’s a natural process of the body that occurs whether we are asleep or awake, conscious or unconscious, happy or sad without any doing from us. Breath forms a bridge between the mind and the body that allows communication through its rhythm. Each emotion originates in the mind, is grounded in the body and has a breathing rhythm associated with it. Anger, fear, joy, sorrow, all of your emotion has a breathing rhythm. Being more conscious of your breathing allows more conscious control over emotional reactions to things that happen in life.

Paying attention to the breath opens communication with the body.

We’re often controlled by emotion in our lives. We may not always be conscious of that control, especially when we experience strong emotions like anger and fear. The breath is a tool that can help develop more awareness. Awareness provides the option of changing our breathing rhythm to remain focused and relaxed so we can act instead of react.

Developing a breath consciousness involves paying attention to the breath in the moment. Looking at the breath when angry or frustrated can help us recognize our breathing rhythms.

A few years ago I mentored a fifteen year old boy who had a problem with anger.

This father had been a drug dealer and was killed in a drug incident, his mother was strung out and he lived with his elderly grandmother. When he got angry nothing else mattered except destroying everything around him. He was a gifted athlete, a good basketball player with the potential to become a really good player.

I worked with him to learn identify the anger before it consumed him. He became aware of where the anger lived in his body and how his breathing changed when he started to get angry. He found that if he noticed the anger before it took him over he could control it by turning inside, centering attention at the place in his body anger lived and changing his breathing. This didn’t happen immediately but he worked on it and he found that this practice gave him control. Last time I talked to him he was living with his sister, and playing on his high school basketball team. This meant his grades were good and he wasn’t getting kicked out of school. Learning to control anger by being conscious of breathing rhythm was important to his turning his life around.

My father once told me “everything changes, if you are sad just breathe and that will change, if you are happy just breathe, and learn to savor life on the middle path, walk on level ground.”

Tagged as: meditation, stress, stress management, stress relief