Breathwork – what is it, what does it do and my first experience of a breath work session
What is it?
So, suddenly I keep hearing about breath work and how good it is for you. I meditate daily in various ways and use my own and others guided visualisation. One of my meditations is breath focused and Ive also used the calm app, which also is breath and thought focused.
In essence breath work is focusing on your breathing and using breathing to calm your body and mind, destress and some forms of breath work can also have more radical affects (these seem to be mainly focused on a form of hyperventilation).
What does it do?
For me and for many people breath work can calm the body and mind. Deep belly breathing calms down the nervous system. It takes us out of the flight or fight response and makes the body and mind feel like its in a relaxed and calm situation. However, you can use breath work to build energy and also some emotional releases. the one I did today was for calming but it also (for me) had a positive side effect of giving me lots of energy.
My first experience of a breath work session.
I’m not a practitioner and a complete newbie to breath work, but I do use focused breathing as a form of meditation and I do this each morning. Its from a book called mindfulness through depression. The one I do is for 3 minutes. The calm app also has very similar short sessions and they are also excellent for calming the mind and body.
So what was the breath work like, how long was it and how did I feel afterwards?
The breath work session I attended was online in a zoom session. The lovely lady Zora ran the session as part of her Patreon membership Zora runs the sessions every Monday and Friday (check her links for times in your country) and the whole session lasts about an hour. This includes 10 minutes of breath work and then a meditation session afterwards.
The breath work that I just did was lovely, it included focusing on the breath in, pause (hold breath for 2 seconds) and then release the breath. The most important thing is you breathe into the belly. Zora counted me through it and it certainly had a lovely calming feeling when I was doing it. She also got us to focus on an outcome. I enjoyed it a lot and the meditation that followed. I ended up falling asleep, which is quite normal. After waking we went to a chill out room, so we could discuss some of the things that had happened. I felt energised despite having just “woken up”! Buzzing might be the operative word.
I will definitely be doing this again (Friday all being well) and I am looking forward to all the variations that we will be doing. Let me know if you use breath work and what you have used it for.
