Breathwork for anxiety and panic is the mindfulness practice we must become familiar with if we are to find inner peace. In today’s episode of the anxiety guy podcast I’ll share with you one of my favorite breathing techniques for mental clarity.
To understand breathwork we must understand hyperventilation. Reason being, hyperventilation corresponds with living unconsciously and in survival mode. Breathwork for anxiety and panic on the other hand brings us back to inner knowing. Inner knowing is an intuitive place, a place of feeling out rather than overthinking and worry. Just as dominos fall one after another, hyperventilation can cause a host of mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual blocks.
Breathwork for anxiety and panic is simply re-training ourselves back into a state of emotional neutrality.
Some people master breathwork quite rapidly whereas others require months of practice. Either way, if there is an area of focus that I would recommend you put your time into, it would be this. Aside from the breathwork for anxiety and panic technique we will use through today’s podcast, there are also a few other suggestions I have for you:
- When you can, breathe through your nose. This increases resistance to stress (here’s a YouTube meditation) and helps to activate the parasympathetic nervous system.
- As you go through the day do not get too caught up with technique. The perfectionist sides of you may want to arise during breathwork for anxiety and panic, deny them at each turn. A simple awareness on how you are breathing is often all that is needed to slow down and encourage abdominal breathing.
- Visualize as you breathe (this playlist on YouTube will guide). Since color was the first language we learned out of the womb, we can use color to send safety signals to the subconscious mind. As you are mindfully breathing imagine breathing in your safety color and moving it through your whole body. As this color moves from head to toe give into the feeling of letting go a well.
- Use a mirror at first. When initially getting into breathwork for anxiety and panic use a mirror to check that the abdomen, or belly, is moving up and down rhythmically.
- On a side note, begin associating safety to expressing your feelings constructively. More often than not anxiety sufferers think suppression is the safe route, the pleasing route to take while around others. Suppression is anxiety while expression is healing. So with all this great breathwork for anxiety and panic that you are doing, express how you feel, your ideas, and the actions that feel right to you.
During the beginning stages of making inner changes to my breathing habits I felt a sense of fear arise within me. I was afraid to change my old ways, my familiar ways. Little did I realize at the time that I wasn’t afraid of what I was doing but rather the fact that I was doing it differently.
As we get to understand our anxiety better we will find that familiarity = safety, and change = threat.
The more often we use this type of breathwork for anxiety in our daily lives the faster we can re-associate things to new meanings. Change doesn’t have to be threatening anymore. Rather, it can be exciting instead. When you were a child you loved surprises of all kinds, the uncertainty of it all was amazing. We can go back there again now, just so you know. You still have those ‘persona parts’ within you waiting to come out and join the experience.
Just because life has been a certain way recently doesn’t mean that that is the way your future will look.
Life is a series of challenges that get easier to confront the more mindfully we breathe. As your breathing affects your concentration levels, it will also have an effect on your actions and perceptions. Everything changes due to your new breathwork for anxiety and panic habits that you will attain and use. As Louise Hay mentions in her book Heal Your Body, breathing problems are associated with fear, not trusting the process of life, and getting stuck in childhood.
Breathwork for anxiety changes the perceptions of our past as well, our traumatic past.
No longer is a past trauma what it has always been up until now. Instead, it is an experience. Soon as we come to realize that it was just another experience, we start taking lessons from it. Once we can place ourselves in this space we no longer see things as good or bad, but rather as life. As life unfolds we trust the process and this takes us out of anxiety and into inner peace. At this point life has a feeling of flow rather than struggle. Breathwork for anxiety and panic can bring us to this place of deep understanding, this I believe.
Also, please keep in mind that breathwork can be implemented for different purposes. Today, within the anxiety guy podcast we’ll be focusing on a calming method. Commonly however, breathwork can be utilized for trauma and emotional release. This approach emphasizes a faster breathing rhythm and allows for direct connection to the subconscious mind/inner child. Keep this in mind as you move into the next chapter in your healing journey.
Enjoy the podcast episode today my friends and I hope to connect with you all very soon once again. Much love.
Dennis
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