Greetings fellow being with lungs.
It is my great honour to inform you that you haven't been using your body's natural system of intake and release properly.
Not only is it a system that allows for real-time trauma and emotional processing, it's greater purpose is its ability to create your desired reality.
It keeps you alive, yes, but if you haven't been using it properly, have you truly been living?
So let's dive in to this amazingly complex and beautiful topic.
Breathwork, a medicine for healing and reality creation
If you are here, I assume that you are suffering with the only dis-ease that human beings really get: existential crisis. It manifests in truly unlimited forms. It's quite something actually, but when you consider WHY it happens, it's not really a surprise.
You are the most powerful thing in all creation. A fractal of Source itself, you are God. You are divinity made manifest in temporary, physical form for the express purpose of learning how to respond and grow through limitations (aka, trauma). You are multi-dimensional. Eternal.
But fuck, you're also a hot mess aren't you?
And make no mistake, you FEEL the frustration at your own perceived failures even more because at some level you are also aware of your limitlessness. You remember what it feels like to fly. To be free. To move unencumbered by space, time, and election cycles. There is an inner knowing that just does not jive with your outer experience, and it creates an incongrunecy that manifests in the form of stagnancy, misery, unfulfillment...and so many other things.
When we are born, the veil of forgeting comes down, and we begin the journey of remembrance. And the degree to which you remember who you truly are, is usually (but not always) equal to the amount of suffering given to you (more accurately, the amount of suffering that you opted for prior to birth, but I digress). This is because suffering and trauma are catalysts for growth, and because of this, they are equally catalysts for awakening. If you have experienced a lot of trauma and find yourself reading this, here and now, you have a big mission in this life. You are here to serve, as we all are, but you are here to help others transmute their darkness in the same way you are being called to do so now.
And here's the good news.
Being a hot mess is the prerequisite to being a spiritual master. We swim against the tide to make us stronger, so that one day we can get past the breakwater and into open ocean. We walk through the flames so that our true selves can emerge, forged and made stronger because of the destruction of all the parts of us that were limiting.
But before we get there, we still have that dis-ease don't we? Fortunately, there's medicine for that, and it's called breathwork.
The miracle of your lungs
Your lungs are miracles. Connected to both your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, they play a critical physiological role in regulating the nervous system, the immune system, circulation, gas exchange and release of waste, while also playing an essential role in maintaining equilibrium between your body, mind, and spirit.
Breathwork, especially when practiced consistently, has so many benefits it's like reading a list of all the most common ailments people in our modern society suffer from and realizing they all have one thing in common...the same cure:
- Stress
- Insomnia
- Physical pain (not to mention emotional and spiritual)
- Depression/hopelessness/low mood
- Lack of purpose
- Self-loathing, self-mistrust
- Unfulfillment
- Spiritual emptiness
- Physiological challenges (COPD, fitness, asthma, circulation)
- Lack of creativity
- PTSD, grief, trauma
So what makes breathwork so special? Well, I already mentioned the lungs' connection to the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. Your respiratory system is part of the autonomic nervous system also, which means that it operates unconsciously, except that you also have the power to take conscious control over it. And that's where the magic happens.
By applying awareness, intention, and proper technique to the act of breathing, you are able to direct your life force energy to wherever it needs to go - which is a more powerful force than you can imagine. Breathwork is also known as Pranayama, which literally translates to life force/breath (Prana) control (ayama), and so the ancients really were on to something that we are only really just beginning to rediscover. As with everything in a fractal holographic universe, the power of our breath to heal ourselves and create our reality has been forgotten, just as we've forgotten our true selves and what we are capable of.
The result of applying awareness, intention, and technique to many different types of scenarios has yielded amazing results from a scientific perspective, and I encourage you to check out my FAQ just as a starter to see what I'm talking about (I try to update with new studies regularly). There are so many great studies which provide scientific proof for something that has been intrinsically known by spiritual masters and breathwork practitioners for thousands of years. But we're moving in the right direction and that's what's important.
But there is something else astounding when it comes to the power of breath.
I hypothesize that a breath hold (which can be an instinctive trauma response) during a traumatic event will anchor that trauma in your body, and with it, a limiting belief (the result of the trauma, aka, what it teaches you about yourself or the world, however wrong).
Certain breath techniques will release that trauma, and just as I believe that the breath hold can anchor in a limiting belief, so too do I believe that it can anchor in a new, expansive one. The trick is to hold the breath while imagining yourself living the reality where those new, expansive beliefs are already in play - feeling, hearing, seeing, tasting, and smelling as YOU in that reality.
How does this all work and why do I believe this? Well, your lungs are connected to your sympathetic nervous system, which is activated during trauma (fight, flight, freeze, or fawn), and knowing what we do about how trauma lives in the body, it just makes sense that the breath is responsible for anchoring limiting beliefs into the body when held during these traumatic moments in life (and equally in moments where our parasympathetic nervous systems are activated, like during times of great joy).
When you actually engage in the practice of breathwork to change your life, you do so by using techniques that first stimulate your sympathetic nervous system to bring to the surface those old lines of code, release them, and then use a technique to engage your parasympathetic nervous system (as well as breath holds while envisioning life in this new reality) to anchor in the new beliefs you're going to use to overwrite the old. In this way, I maintain that while trauma healing, emotional release, and spiritual awakening are byproducts of breathwork, they are not the ultimate purpose of it - which is to afford us, as the powerful, creative fractals of Source that we are, the ability to manifest the reality we prefer.
Interestingly, a study suggests that galaxies regulate their 'breathing' to ensure proper growth (more evidence of that fractal holographic universe at play). So if a galaxy does it, so can you.
Reality shifting
What this means is that within yourself you have the power to change your beliefs about yourself and the world.
And when you consider that your beliefs create your reality (because that's how goddamn powerful you are), this is a wee bit of a game-changer.
Anecdotally, I have experienced the transformative effect of this within myself. But even more powerful is how I've witnessed this technique in action among my students.
If you are ready to experience the power of your breath to change your reality, and do so in a way that is rapid and profound, I encourage you to visit The Lightning Shift to see how your transformation journey can start, today.
