Air breathing

Air breathing can help diminish anxiety, depression and also assist in accessing your optimal personal wisdom. Research has found that an individual’s HRV or heart rate variability is a useful measure of how a person and their heart specifically, are coping with stress. In fact your HRV can indicate much about the state of your ANS or autonomic nervous system. The graph below depicts a heart rate of someone under stress (although it might mimic a stock raging up and down in the market-place). Our heart rates speed up when our ANS has a sympathetic response to something such as when a situation frightens us and we feel compelled to run away, or stop and fight. Once the incident passes, our parasympathetic system kicks in to bring the ANS back to homeostasis or back down to a calmer state.

Therefore contrast this first graph with the next to notice the smooth changes in the heart of someone experiencing an even or calm state. Perhaps after the parasympathetic system has done its job. To some trained eyes, this graph almost appears to be a sine wave which in mathematics might be called a pattern of “high coherence.” For our purposes this term coherence is the measure that describes an evenly, repeatable pattern of wave-form from moment to moment. In contrast the first graph depicts sharp changes which would indicate “low coherence.”

With all of this in mind not that breathing in with a series of inhaling for approximately six seconds followed by exhaling in the exact duration over a period of about 2 minutes can lead to putting yourself into a state of “high coherence.” Living from a state of as much coherence as possible can you afford you a valuable mighty little self-care practice. In return this exercise can assist in warding off or diminishing anxiety, depression, fear and a number of other similar experiences.

In addition, the m-BIT or m-Braining (Multiple Brain Integration) tools which I use with clients are best accessed after conducting a short balanced breathing exercise. Over the past ten years, the field of Neuroscience has uncovered the complex functions of several neural networks within each human body. Literally we have at least three powerful centers of intelligence and only one of these is the brain inside our head. Our heart and gut called the cardiac and enteric brains respectively, exhibit wisdom or intelligence as well. As it turns out, esoteric and ancient spiritual traditions have known this for years and given us advice such as: “Trust your gut.” or “Follow your heart.” Now we have scientific evidence that when an individual’s ANS is in a state of coherence they can access the highest, evolved form of wisdom right from within their own heart, head and gut.