Breathwork is the New Meditation

Connect with Your Innate Inner Wisdom, One Breath at a Time.

Take a deep breath-centered in your belly, then exhale it out completely allowing your belly button to pull in towards your spine. Do it again. It is as simple as it is profound.

When you’re feeling overwhelmed, stressed, or anxious the quickest way to balance yourself out is through the breath. 10 rounds of deep belly breathing can do wonders for your nervous system.

Yet breathwork is more than a couple of inhales and exhales. It’s a powerful tool that can clear out stagnant energy harboring within you and balance your energy levels. Breathwork guides you back towards feeling. Whatever you’re feeling energetically and emotionally can be worked through with a focused mind paired with conscious breathwork.

What’s the difference between breathwork and meditation?

The most obvious difference between the two practices is that most forms of meditation ask you to simply observe the breath. Letting your natural rhythm be the guide. Where breathwork practices are intended to intentionally change and manipulate the breath for a set amount of time.

Breathwork is more like a moving mediation. It gives you something concrete to focus on. This is why I believe that breathwork is so popular today. Many people have sought relief from their troubled minds through meditation and failed. Breathwork offers the same principles and can be easier for our minds to wrap around. With something to focus on — the breath — it works as a gateway moving our attention from our thoughts to our body, offering more immediate results.

Both are great tools to pull out when you’re overwhelmed, yet breathwork seems like a more doable answer in our fast-paced always thinking world.

The deep self-reflection that comes from meditation is awesome. It allows you to create space between your thoughts and the truth. Yet for many it also keeps you stuck in your head. The slow steady pace of a meditation is meant to calm, but for many it’s too much. When we can’t escape our thoughts we feel like a failure and easily give up on meditation. It’s no fun to practice something you don’t think you’re at. I wish someone had told me that your thoughts are part of your meditation. The trick is to not get stuck on one thought, but let it float through your mind like a moving picture.

I don’t know about you, but it is impossible for me to think of nothing. And there’s this idea that if you are to truly meditate then your mind is clear of thought. I disagree. Meditation is about seeing your thoughts clearly without judgment. Once I made this shift, the noise in the background quit bothering me so much. I stopped trying to fight the thoughts in my head, but rather allowed them to be there. Like that annoying person at work. You have to learn to work with them, so you just tune them out. You learn to not let them get your goat, and start to view them more like an annoying stain that you just learn to live with. This mind-shift helped my meditation process go from frustration to clarity.

Breathwork allows you to see your thoughts as a wave. Using your breath you can push away the mind-chatter by putting focus on your breath instead of constantly trying to think of nothing.

What a focused breathing meditation can do for you.

Conscious breathwork lowers stress, tension, and anxiety stored up in the body. The nourishing inhales and exhales move through your cells and release stored trauma that has been sitting stagnant in your body.

Using what you are feeling in the body as your guide, breathwork becomes a teacher. Much like meditation, it offers you space to find clarity, connection, peace, and opens you up to new insights.

Your experience with breathwork is a matter of the work you put into it. It deepens your concentration and helps you become present in the moment. This takes time and you have to want to put in the effort.

If you are new to breathwork as a way to meditate it might feel good to find a guide.

• A guide who can lead you through the work and help keep you focused while offering reminders of the mechanics involved.
• You’ll want to find a quiet place where you will not be disturbed.
• Allow the guide to bring you through the experience.
• Always trust that the breath is moving towards the healing and answers you seek.

It is completely normal and common for deep-seated emotions to rise to the surface. This is your body actively healing itself. You must acknowledge what you feel and allow it to pass through you in order to be released.

Other sensations might come up as well. Side effects of a conscious breathing meditation can also include tingling, buzzing, warming, or cooling of the body and insights into situations of your life.

Your body is a cellular machine. It knows what you need to heal. You must be open to allow the experience to pass through you and trust that your body knows what it’s doing.

Your breath is your life force and is a direct line towards your inner wisdom. Every time you sit in a breathing meditation you are opening channels of energy within you that align you to healing. And the best part is you don’t even have to figure it out! You just have to sit and breathe and the healing begins to happen naturally.

Clarity is power and like meditation breathwork offers transition. Both in body and mind. Breathwork supports you through any challenging situation you might be going through and allows space for it to be released. No longer feeling stuck, answers you seek will rise as your clarity grows. The mind-chatter will hold less meaning as you develop a deeper connection to your inner knowing.

Breathing meditation is a form of self-care. There has been a ton of research on the topic from research studies at University like Standford, to other forms of trendy individuals like my favorite, Wim Hof. Over and over it has been shown that breathwork can actually change the way our brain reacts to our environment. Allowing space for emotions and decision-making to be rewired in a healthy way one breath at a time.

My favorite thing about breathwork and using it as a form of active meditation is how accessible it is to everyone. We all breathe, and we can all take this life-giving tool within us as a guide towards inner wisdom. Your breath is a gateway from the outer to the inner world. Conscious slow meditative breathwork is the key towards health, wellness, and inner peace.