Breath and Pain

Can breath really help with physical pain?

When I created my course, Beginning with Breath, I didn’t know the extent of what people would experience through the teachings. I designed it to encourage a slowing down, a reset back into a parasympathetic state, an avenue for increasing clarity and intuition and most importantly a foundation for consistency.

I’m honestly surprised at the level of healing that’s happening, especially for physical pain.

Of course this makes sense, because physical pain is really at the crux of my work with individuals. How do we work with our pain, listen to it, understand and build a relationship with it? How do we listen to what it’s telling us so that we might begin to release it?

As we work with breath, especially in the current climate of our global conscious, we think of releasing stress. But stress and pain are co-mingled. They dance together in the effort of our holding. So, of course, when we slow down and witness (and I mean really slow down and observe) the way we inhale and exhale, there is a whole magical world of wisdom available to us.

Here are a few examples of what’s happening for a few who came to the free breath session and are now working on their own time with the course.

• a noticing of pelvic floor, sacral and jaw tension linked to the inhale and a pattern of tongue tension when inhaling and when singing. These patterns have been causing pain, and now with the breath, she is beginning to stretch gently into the sacral and pelvic bowl tension, while learning to let go of the tongue and jaw tension.

• a simple awareness of needing to slow down alongside the awareness of fascial pulling near scar tissue. With the breath, tension around the scar tissue begins to disperse.

• for someone experiencing severe prolapse and organ pain, the breath brought release and tingling awareness to affected organs.

• for two women both working with traumatic brain injury, the breath brought blood flow throughout their skulls and to the source of injury.

Pretty cool, right?

If you’re feeling like this work could help you or someone you love in some way, the course is open and designed to be done on your own time.

And maybe you’re thinking, why slowing down? I just want to get to it…. (this is how my mind works.) I don’t really want to slow down and listen. I want to do some kind of assertive work or action that gets her done! Unfortunately, it just doesn’t work that way. I’ve tried…. over and over and over again. The magic is in the slow down stuff.

When I teach circular breathing (the breathwork that feels action oriented and like its shaking things up), I always start with the slowing down first. The slowing down sets that bigger breathwork up to be TRANSFORMATIVE. The slowing down makes your body feel safe, sets you into a parasympathetic flow and shows you patterns in your body that need attention, so that they can be tended to in that deeper breathwork.

So, if I leave you with a seed of anything today… it’s slow down enough to hear your breath cycles. Start there.

I love you.