Emotions and Breathing

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American Psychologist has an excellent article exposing the increasing evidence found in the scientific community regarding violence in the media and violence in society while the media itself ignores, denies or plays down the blinding evidence. The relationship is a strong one. There is overwhelming evidence that violence in the media does in fact cause violence in children and violence in our society. However, due to a variety of reasons (not the least of which is economic) the news media, both TV news and news periodicals continue to deny the evidence and sway public opinion to allow it to continue unregulated. Buhmand & Anderson (2001). American Psychologist, vol 56(6/7), 477-489.

"The word proactive means more than merely taking initiative. It means that as human beings, we are responsible for our own lives. Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions. We can subordinate feelings to values. We have the initiative and responsibility to make things happen."

-- Steven Covey
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

We all have the power to create the life we really want to have. The key is finding the tools and support system that will help us to most easily and quickly bring forth, from within, our highest and best.

There is no question that emotions control hormone secretions and nerve activities which either strengthen or weaken the immune system. Hormones and nerves are greatly influenced by emotions, which affect every physiological and metabolic function in our bodies. It is vital to work on eliminating resentment, anger, hate, fear, guilt, depression, greed and other negative emotions. I have found that visualizing one's self as perfectly healthy and happy can be very effective. Many healings (or spontaneous remissions) of death dealing illnesses have occurred just from attitudinal changes that altered negative emotions and changed them to positive. Clearly uncontrolled emotions such as anger can be destructive to one's health. Exercise, optimal breathing practices and spiritual practices can help transform this potentially devastating habit.

Your quality and level of intensity of emotion is directly related to the way you breathe. Restrictive breathing patterns also support subconscious defense mechanisms in "stuffing down" unpleasant emotions. In fact, such unhealthy breathing patterns are often the result of previous attempts to cope with traumatic emotional or physical events dating back as early as or even before birth. When feelings go unexpressed they are consciously repressed or subconsciously "suppressed" (i.e., stored in the body/mind as chronic tension). It is inevitable that unexpressed feelings/emotions are eventually expressed as pain and disease. Since feelings are a form of energy, which cannot be destroyed (as Einstein proved years ago), but can only change form, it is our responsibility to transform this energy before it causes disease in our bodies and/or minds. See information about anger, stress and the heart. We CAN be the way we want to be.

The more you develop and get in touch with your breathing and its relationship with your entire body the healthier you can become and more you can stay in touch with yourself and others.

My approach to the hierarchy of one's experience of emotions is:

1. Breathing
2. Body sensations
3. Feelings
4. Emotions
5. Expressions

The intensity and toleration of emotion is directly interdependent with the depth, ease and balance of the breath. Please hold your breath and try to feel intense joy or happiness.

Impossible isn't it?

With the unobstructed breath there is "freedom". Breathing free really is yet another breathing metaphor for life.

Separate Realities

"Love--THE FEELING -- is the fruit of love, the verb.

Reactive people make it a feeling. Hollywood has generally scripted us to believe that we are not responsible, that we are a product of our feelings. But the Hollywood script does not describe the reality. If our feelings control our actions, it is because we have abdicated our responsibility and empowered them to do so."

Steven Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

You might say it is our thoughts alone that drive or dominate us. If our body permits it we can hold several different realities concurrently. Our focus, consciousness, intention or attention will choose which one or ones become dominant. If our breathing, the link to the mind-body-spirit integration, is somehow compromised, our connection to our mind-body-spirit center or wholeness, becomes limited and even distorted. This is often because our nervous system has been pulled off balance or misdirected by our unbalanced breathing.

Optimal breathing is in many ways senior to thinking.

From studying hypnosis we already suspect that reality is often what we think is so. But another level of awareness is how we feel, and what we intuit. Intuition requires body/mind connection and body/mind connection requires balanced breathing. I suspect that in many ways, the more hypnotizable we are the less we are in touch with our bodies.

ESP is a matter of extra sensitivity. Watch the antenna of the breathing and see how it is connected to the sensing and feeling of the body. They are I believe interdependent.

As children we hold or suppress our breath. Trauma and bad habit also makes it shallow or distorted. Many of us reach adulthood with unbalanced or distorted breathing. This can distort our view of the world, keep us out of touch with our feelings and emotions, cause problems in our personal relationships, make us sick and sometimes want to die. Breathing depth, ease and awareness are the foundation of your healthy "feelback" (instead of "feedback") system.

Feelback?

"Anger can be associated with shallow inhalations, strong exhalations, tension to the body especially in the neck, jaw, chest, and hands. Guilt may appear as a restricted or suffocating, shallow breath and an overall sensation of being weighed down

Boredom might be associated with a shallow lifeless breath and little sensation anywhere in one's body.

Grief can be associated with a sort of spasmodic-sobbing-superficial breath and a hollow empty feeling in pit of the stomach or the belly.

Depression can be observed as a depressed or sunken upper chest.

Impatience can look like short, jerky, uncoordinated breaths and tension in the front of the chest with a slight bending forward of the upper body.

Love, compassion kindness, wonder are associated with deep, expansive comfortable breathing and an open energized receptive feeling throughout the entire body. Each of us will discover variations in his or her own physical and emotional world. click here for an ancient sensing and feeling breathing meditation."

-- Dennis Lewis
The Tao of Natural Breathing
Used with permission.

Restrictive breathing patterns also support subconscious defense mechanisms in "stuffing or holding back " unpleasant emotions. In fact, such unhealthy breathing patterns are often the result of previous attempts to cope with traumatic emotional or physical events dating back as early as or even before birth. When feelings go unexpressed they are consciously repressed or subconsciously "suppressed" (i.e., stored in the mind and body as chronic tension). It is inevitable that unexpressed feelings/emotions are eventually expressed as pain and disease. Kathlyn Hendricks, a leading-edge movement therapist calls this "coming out crooked." Intense emotions also stifle digestion and peristalsis.

We seek emotional balance. Since feelings are a form of energy, which cannot be destroyed (as Einstein proved years ago), but can only change form, it is our responsibility to transform this energy before it causes disease in our body/mind. We do this with our thinking and our breathing.

To not engage the breath when attempting to change our ways of thinking is to overlook the primary link to our mind body spirit connection and relationship; the billows behind the fire of our lives. This over-site actually invites frustration and re-enforces failure just as much as if we had wanted to fail in the first place. No wonder some of us really believe we are destined for a life of negative experiences. Expand your breath and you expand your creativity and possibilities.

Do we need to pay a lot of attention to WHY we do these things that do not serve us? Perhaps, but not necessarily so. Patterns can be changed with focus and intention. A much more satisfying way of being is in choosing the way we want to be - the wellness model-, not the way we do not want to be - the illness model. But in order to do that we must breathe through any resistance to change. New ways of feeling, unfamiliar territory within our body can cause anxiety as the energy created from the new experience is "intolerable" (Wilhelm Reich's way of putting it).

Our body's resistance to excessive energy is, to us, often scary and unsettling. Our toleration for joy and happiness is limited and needs gradual increasing; a gradient approach. I refer to this as "raising one's energy thermostat". But when we do address it we can change the way we think and feel so quickly that even one session of consciously directed breathing can be equal to years of formal psychotherapy. Another reason why therapists are fast learning how to use the breath as a tool transformation. The #130 Better Breathing Exercise #2 aka Tibetan Caffeine is a dependable way to increase one's energy without it causing problems with energy overload.

Krishmamurti said that "meditation is easy, we just complicate it." And it is the same for feeling the way we want to feel. You CAN in many if not all ways, choose the way you want to be. This takes time and intention. One's "nature" stems from the idea of natural. But natural breathing is not necessarily healthy. It can be distorted or balanced. With conscious attention to your breathing, the lead horse in your team of horses called your autonomic nervous system, being "who you really are" becomes more aligned with your "healthy" nature. This nature needs the support of healthy breathing lest the lead horse guide the others towards the perils of mountain chasms or the glue factory. A primary secret of self-directed states of mind and being lies in choosing our thoughts and the way we use our breathing.

In the extreme, people with OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) generally have accompanying disabilities In fact, 69% of people with OCD also have additional disorders such as anxiety disorders, depression, or tic disorders. Haliburn, J. (2000). J. of the Am. Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, Vol 39(1), 13-14.

Trust me in this. You CAN be the way you want to be. Never give up hope for that. Never. Think of the way you want to be and BREATHE it in, again and again and again. Let the out-breath be an expression of that.

Breath is life. I encourage everyone to study the breath. Try many different breathing exercises and see which ones work best for you. But be careful of the ones that will restrict your breathing and/or voice.

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