breath

Before getting into the world of green juice and Downward Dog I never thought twice about breath. As a former corporate American strapped to a cubicle, slugging vodka sodas on the weekends to numb my lack of fulfillment, for decades I thought breath was just something we are born with and had no advantages worth exploring.

That belief transformed when I entered my yoga teacher training. Here I had a whole paradigm shift through the Indian guru showering me with ancient wisdom about this sacred tool of breath living inside us. As I sat in the yoga hall in the mountains of Northern India, I learned what we should have been taught as a child: the importance of breath and its multitude of benefits.

“Breath is the hub round which the wheel of life revolves”-  B.K.S. Iyengar. Our breath is the gateway opening the door to our emotional storage tank and to the temple of our bodies. It is the portal to our inner world, our sacred space, amongst the external chaos. So how do we begin to tap into this magical reserve?

Use breath to digest emotions: The primary cause of our unhappiness and discomfort is not our thoughts; it is our undigested emotional material. Without breath we keep our emotions suppressed, stagnant, and blocked. When we de-press our emotions we cause dis-ease in our minds and bodies–see what I did there?

We are wired to move in the direction of whatever animal inside of us roars the loudest. If the loudest animal is our emotions, roaring from a trigger touched by a lover or a core wound flare up of not being good enough, this animal will take the driver’s seat and oh what a wild ride it will be. Flooded with unresolved emotions and unexpressed truths, our monkey mind leaps from tree to tree, emoting from a place of unprocessed emotions, dancing in the utter chaos and confusion. When our emotions steer, our breath is completely forgotten, our mind is agitated, we are out of alignment, and completely disconnected.

On the other hand, when our breath roars the loudest, our mind is silenced and emotions are controlled.  It’s that simple, all we have to do is have our breath roar louder than our emotions. Once the breath roar is the loudest, it becomes the travel guide to our emotional storage tank. Then from here we can begin to process and digest.

When we feel ourselves inside of an emotional spin, when our emotions are in the drivers seat, here is how we use our breath as to process:

1. Breathe.
2. Identify the feeling: Ask yourself “what am I feeling?” Breathe deeply into it. Keep breathing until your feelings rush to the surface, to the top of your awareness.
3. Let the feeling be heard: Feel it, sit with it, give your feeling a voice. Keep going until you feel like it has really been heard. Keep breathing. Keep feeling. Purge it in any way that feels right to you: cry, scream, run, dance. Breathe through your purging process: inhaling truth and exhaling limiting beliefs.
4. Find the gift: Ask yourself  “how is this feeling showing me exactly where I need to give myself more love?” Breathe as the answers come to you: inhaling clarity and exhaling confusion.

Give yourself that love in which you just discovered that you need! Use breath to connect with our intuition by moving from our minds into our bodies: Breath silences our ego by bringing our mind into our body. This way we don’t exert energy over analyzing, processing, looping and instead we keep our energy reserve full for the things we really need and want to do! Excessive analysis perpetuates emotional paralysis.

Our breath is the elevator from our mind down to our bodies, back to physical sensation, a return to the present moment: Our bodies are our tuning forks, our internal compasses guiding us to our true north. When we find ourselves in a mental loop of chaos and confusion, aka mind masturbation, we need to do one thing: return to the body through our breath.

You see, it is impossible for our bodies to lie. We just need to learn how to read the internal compasses within, and we do so through our breath. Intuition is the physical sensation of truth in our bodies. Albert Einstein said, “The only real valuable thing is your intuition.” Through our breath we can tap into this truth detector within.

Here is how we do it: Feel where and how your “yes” and “no” feels in your body: If you feel sensations such as light, expanded, or free, your answer is yes. If you feel heavy, contracted, dark, uncomfortable, or smothered, your answer is no. Practice learning what your yes and no feels like and where you feel it in your body with easy questions first, like “my name is___.”

When we are seeking answers to life’s challenging questions, we break the spin of confusion by tapping into our body compass through this process:

1. Recognize that you’re in a mental loop and seeking an answer. Pause your mental masturbation and breathe.
2. Raise your vibration by stimulating your senses: We cannot find a solution at the level of the problem. Through smells like incense, sage and palo santo, sounds like soothing music (my absolute favorite to listen to when aiming to connect with myself is Nameless Energy by DTO yoga/meditation album because its intention is to inspire, uplift and fuel the union of mind body spirit, which is exactly what it does for me every time), or change your scenery by going outside or changing rooms. These are all ways to shift our energy levels so that we become a match to the answer coming through.
3. Breathe into your whole body. Then breathe directly into your heart. Put your hand on your heart as you connect deeper inside, into your internal compass, and breathe.
4. Ask the question directly to your heart.
5. Feel for your yes and no: Where do you feel it in your body? What does it feel like?
6. Breathe and receive the answer directly from your body. Keep asking and breathing until you receive a clean answer. Rephrase the question if you need. Here is a great way to phrase it: “Is it in my highest good to _____?”

Our breath is the elevator to our true selves, a direct flight to our evolution. ”Repressed emotions are unactualized spiritual lessons. In order to grow in our spirituality, we must bring our joy and our suffering through our emotional body until our lessons are birthed” – Jeff Brown. It’s alarmingly simple: All we have to do is breathe and have self awareness of when we are in our in emotional and mental loops. This way, our breath becomes our sacred medicine.

By Maggie Kay

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