Meditation and Breathwork
What is Meditation?
Meditation is a way of focusing the mind. There are many different styles and forms of meditation which can feel confusing to the first time meditator. Having a guide help identify which techniques will best fit into and enhance your life can make all the difference.
What makes learning to meditate valuable and what does it have to do with health? Quite often stress and anxiety become chronic not because of actual situations but because of constant chatter in your conscious and unconscious mind. Negative and non-supportive thoughts, beliefs and ideas become stronger every time they are repeated. Eventually this chatter can take over and continue repeating the negative tapes without any effort at all on your part. Since the body responds to these thoughts with the appropriate chemical response you can end up feeling depressed, in pain, unworthy, ill, anxious without having a clue why.
This is where meditation can become a critical part of the healing process. As you learn to still your mind the non-supportive thoughts and beliefs will begin to rise to the surface. Once there you can begin to identify which are true and which are untrue. You can create conscious supportive thoughts and use them instead, generating a whole new mindset and feeling of well-being that will absolutely effect your physical health.
Meditation also helps physiologically. As your mind is learning to slow down so is the rest of your body. Sitting quietly allows your nervous system to re-balance. Your heartrate slows, blood pressure levels, blood flow to the brain and extremities increases, and digestive and immune systems resume functioning.
What is Breathwork?
Breathwork goes hand in hand with meditation. Slowing the breath helps quiet the mind which in turn has all sorts of positive and balancing effects on the bodymind as mentioned above. However, the power of breathing correctly goes far beyond just helping to quiet the bodymind!
In fact, breathing correctly is one of the single most important things you can do for your health! Proper respiration is critical to living. Most of us think of respiration as the larger process of inhaling and exhaling.
However respiration is much more that simply the process in the lungs of removing carbon dioxide from the body, it is also the process of generating necessary chemical reactions at the cellular level for the various functions of the cell.
Respirated or oxygenated cells are healthy cells, they keep the acid/alkaline balance in your body, they remove toxins, create energy, transfer nutrients and much more. Cells that are not sufficiently oxygenated are unable to perform their designated tasks and your body begins to break down and disease takes over.
Breathwork is the process of learning how to properly oxygenate the body and stimulate the nervous system.
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