By Sejal Shah
Did you know breathwork is the new workout? Here’re the top 10 breathwork benefits that you must know and how you can start reaping them today.
Take a gentle deep breath in expanding your belly, chest, and shoulders. Hold your breath. And gradually fully breathe out. Repeat this 3-5 times.
Notice how you feel.
And there you go! You have just practiced simple breathwork and experienced its calming effect! Didn’t you? Yes!
What is breathwork and how is it the new workout?
Breathwork is an ancient practice rooted in yoga. And it is getting a lot of attention now as the larger yoga community has started understanding yoga beyond the body. Finally, the community has matured and opened its eyes to see the human existence beyond the gross body. For over 40+ years, the Art of Living has been teaching the seven levels of existence: Body, Breath, Mind, Intellect, Memory, Ego, Self. Breath connects your body to your mind and it has an influence on the state of your mind. And the quality of your mind has an impact on the quality of your life. Therefore consciously attending to your breath is so vital.
Most of the time, most of us don't even realize that we are breathing—it just happens automatically, on its own 24/7. It is the breath that keeps us alive, and yet, so often, we go through the day chronically shallow breathing, denying ourselves our full life force. This has a gradual adverse effect on us at all levels.
A breathwork practice is about the intentional steering and directing of breath and is a powerful way to access your body’s innate intelligence to heal itself. While there are many variations, styles, and names, all types of breathwork have the potential to offer personal transformation in varying degrees through improved physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being.
Why breathwork is gaining momentum
According to Google Trends, searches for "breathwork" have increased 6-fold over the last five years. In the initial years, many people first got a taste of breathwork in their yoga class or meditation studio. Now, increasing numbers of people from all walks of life are looking for full-fledged breathwork classes and retreat to improve their physical and mental health.
Recent research is validating the powerful benefits that breathwork offers on its own on the body, mind, and spirit. Let us look into these amazingly profound benefits and how you can start reaping them for yourself.
The top 10 breathwork benefits that you must know today
1. Increases your energy levels and boosts your immune system:
Our breath is one of the most important sources of energy. With the practice of breathwork, your lungs start functioning to their full capacity leading to a better O2-CO2 exchange not only in the lungs but also at cellular levels. The incoming breath brings fresh energy, while the outgoing breath cleanses and relaxes, leading to overall improved energy levels and stronger stamina. The body can use this extra energy to boost your immunity or give you energy as and when you need it like when you are sleep-deprived or working out or when you have too many things on your plate to deal with. With daily breathwork practice, you can start enhancing your energy levels considerably.
2. Eliminates the majority of toxins from your body:
Deep breathing helps detoxify your body, boosts your lung efficiency, and promotes a healthy heart. When you breathe properly and fully with breathwork practices, it helps to expel over 70% of the toxins like carbon dioxide from your body (the other 30% of the toxins are released through sweating, the bladder, and the bowels). With the practice of deep rhythmic breathing, you are expanding your diaphragm which relaxes the body and massages your lymphatic system. This improves lymphatic circulation and helps the elimination of toxins. Deep breathing also assists in improving blood circulation, which also helps with the process of elimination and detoxification.
3. Improves your resilience towards stress, anxiety, depression, anger:
In today’s modern world, few of us haven’t struggled with stress, anxiety, or depression at some point in life. The practice of breathwork offers a very safe way to release these difficult states of stress, anxiety, depression, anger, and also sadness and grief that we tend to hold on to. In fact, breathwork not only releases these negative emotions but also boosts our resilience towards them making sure these don’t start affecting our personal, social, and professional lives. How we breathe often indicates how we feel. While the short, shallow rapid breaths make us anxious and tired, slow, long deep breaths can help us feel calm, centered, grounded, and energized. Deep breathing activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which takes us out of fight or flight mode (the sympathetic nervous system). This slows down your heart rate, lowers your blood pressure, and creates a deep feeling of calm, and reduces your overall stress and anxiety.
4. Improves quality of your sleep
With the amount of caffeine we consume, the types of extra sugary food that we eat, increased use of gadgets and screen time, the sedentary lifestyle that we live, the work-life imbalance that we have, as well as day-to-day low-grade stress and anxiety we experience, there are many factors that negatively impact the quality of our sleep. Breathwork helps to calm the overstimulated nervous system and calms the stress, thus helps you to get a better night’s sleep by allowing you to fall asleep faster and sleep more deeply.
5. Releases trauma and fear lingering in your body
Negative emotions, fear, and trauma when not processed properly can get trapped and stored in the body. When this happens, the life energy doesn’t flow smoothly in the proper direction in the body. This can cause many physical as well as emotional issues. You may be holding trauma and scars or negative impressions from childhood too, not allowing yourself to live your life to the fullest. Breathwork is an incredibly powerful tool to aid emotional release and let go of any fear, traumas, impressions, limiting beliefs, and negative emotions, or any remnants of past experiences that are no longer serving you any purpose. In fact, during the breathwork practice, you may sometimes experience tears rolling down your uncontrollably, or you may find yourself laughing or shouting in anger too or expressing any such intense emotions.
6. Connects you to the present, inner peace, happiness, and joy
Your mind may be racing with thoughts of the past and the future. But what about your breath? Can you breathe for your yesterday or for your future? No, you can’t, can you? You can breathe only for this moment. This breath and this moment is your reality, the rest all is so uncertain. There is no better way than connecting with the rhythm of your breath to sink deeply in the present moment and savor the here and now. As soon as you bring your mind to your breath, the chattering mind stops wandering in the past or future, you come back to the present moment. You become free from past regrets and future worries. The present moment is all filled with peace, happiness, and joy. Breathwork allows you to go deep within and unwraps the gifts that the present moment brings.
7. Heals you from deep within
The innate wisdom of your life force and breath knows exactly where to go for the level of healing that is required for you at any given time. The practice of breathwork provides the opportunity for you to heal deeply from within. As the breath opens and flows through meridians and nadis (subtle energy channels) it aligns your body with its inherent healing energy. Your body feels energized and your mind feels calm and clear. To know you can receive clarity and peace just by breathing is so empowering.
8. Helps you with pain management
Deep breathing can be a powerful way to quickly relax any painful part. Your breath has a very deep therapeutic and soothing effect on your body-mind. As you inhale, your breath brings in fresh oxygen that gets healing energy to the painful part and as you exhale, breath relaxes the affected area by releasing the toxins that may be causing pain. So much so that breathwork can also help alleviate back pain.
With the opioid epidemic, in fact, doctors and patients are increasingly looking for safer alternatives to prescribing pharmaceutical pain killers for pain management. A research-based recent article in Washington Post suggests that yoga, meditation, and breathing practices could be the solution to overcome the opioid crisis.
9. Improves your digestion and assimilation
Breathwork can help the digestive process by stimulating and increasing blood flow throughout the digestive tract. Deep diaphragmatic breathing creates a gentle massaging effect on the internal organs like the intestines and stomach, which can improve digestion and reduce many GI issues like indigestion, bloating, and constipation. Deep breathing supplies more oxygen to all body parts, including the digestive system. This in turn improves intestinal strength, aids in overall digestion, and also helps the body to absorb more nutrients. With a breathwork practice, as you are reducing your overall stress and anxiety levels, you are more likely to make better food choices, and thus are less likely to overeat and/or eat the unhealthy foods that trigger digestion issues! It is said that prevention is better than cure.
10. Connects you to the higher state of consciousness
Breath is the link between the outside world of activity and dynamism and the inner world of peace and silence. Any breathwork technique that you practice will have a soothing effect on your mind and consciousness. But some breathwork techniques like SKY Breath Meditation have the potential to take you to the other realm tapping into the higher meditative state of consciousness. It feels as if it stirs and churns the life force energy (the prana) from deep within and you start to experience what can be described as a spiritual awakening. Recent research on SKY on different brain waves concluded that a single session of SKY generates global brain rhythm dominantly with high-frequency cerebral activation and initiates appropriate interhemispheric synchronization in brain rhythms as state effects. This suggests that SKY leads to better attention, memory, and emotional and autonomic control along with enhanced cognitive functions, which finally improves physical and mental well-being. This is because the spectral power increased significantly in all frequency bands bilaterally in frontal, central, parietal, temporal, and occipital regions of the brain after SKY. This is so unique to SKY.
What is SKY Breath Meditation and how to practice it?
SKY Breath Meditation or Sudarshan Kriya® is powerful and transformational breathwork, that involves several types of cyclical breathing patterns. SKY makes us realize that our life is vast and infinite like the sky. In Sanskrit, ‘Su’ means proper or clear, ‘darshan’ means vision, ‘kriya’ means a purifying act of breathing. With the practice of Sudarshan Kriya, as you release toxins and destress, you get a clear vision of who you really are and the vastness and infinite nature of your being.
Practiced by millions across the world, SKY is my personal favorite breathwork technique. Apart from all the benefits that are mentioned above, there is mounting evidence to suggest that SKY can be a beneficial, low-risk, low-cost breathwork therapy adjunct to the treatment of stress, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, stress-related medical illnesses, substance abuse, and rehabilitation of criminal offenders. It is easy and safe breathwork that brings you to the doorway of meditation where you effortlessly slip into a meditative state.
If you would like to know more about SKY, you could also attend a free online introductory session - Beyond Breath where an instructor can provide all necessary information along with an experience of a basic breathing technique and guided meditation, in addition to answering any questions that you may have.
It is said that how we breathe is how we live, and so to live life to its fullest, we believe we should learn the art and science of breathing. And that’s where a breathwork practice comes in. Breathwork bridges ancient wisdom with modern research to help you unlock your full potential. Come breathe with us at the Beyond Breath and begin to experience firsthand the healing power of the breath.
Sejal Shah, E-RYT 500 Sri Sri Yoga Teacher, YACEP, C-IAYT, Meditation Teacher, SKY Instructor, NYU Post Graduate Medical School approved Yoga-CME retreat facilitator, Mind-Body Wellness Writer, Homeopath. She can be followed on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
