Breath Practice: Making Your Own Medicine
Some of the most chronic and debilitating diseases that affect most North Americans if not all populations can be significantly helped with something as simple as the breath. With changing the pattern of your breath, you can get almost instantaneous changes in your physical and emotional wellbeing. With deep breaths and longer exhalations, your body starts to increase and decrease certain neurotransmitters and hormones that have positive effects on your overall wellbeing. In the most basic sense, just by changing your breath to one that involves more of the diaphragm, a large muscle that separates the chest from the abdomen, we can shift the body into more of the parasympathetic response of the autonomic nervous system. The parasympathetic system is more of what is termed the rest and digest...