Just Breathe

I've been breathing my whole life.  But it wasn’t until I developed debilitating anxiety that I actually paid attention to my breath.  I was at the beginning of a long journey of healing for complex trauma, and I needed to tend to my anxious body along the way.  Many things helped, but to my surprise, breathing helped the most.  

We can tend to our trauma in two basic ways: top down or bottom up.  Top down involves engaging the left brain in cognitive processes.  In storywork that involved telling my stories and making sense of what I found.  That was a hard but fruitful process.  My body needed relief sooner.  So, I learned about bottom up processing, which involved giving care to my physical body, where my trauma responses were stored (in the right sensory processing part of the brain.)  

There are a lot of ways to experience bottom-up processing like deep breathing, somatic experiencing, grounding exercises and guided imagery.  These can bring great relief to the body.  My favorite, having tried many, is a technique called 4-7-8 breathing.  I use it daily and it brings profound calm to my central nervous system.  

It’s quite simple.  You breathe in for a count of four through the nose into the diaphragm.  Hold the breath for a count of seven, and then forcefully blow out through pursed lips to a count of eight.  This exaggerated exhale engages the parasympathetic nervous system, instructing your body to relax.  I recommend doing several breaths to experience the deep calm that comes.  Try adding two sessions of it to your daily rhythms and give yourself the gift of rest.