By Tamara Gillest
Last month, I talked about physical balance and how important it is to eat right and move your body. You can find that article by searching under the health tab on www.westsideseattle.com
This month, the topic is: energetic balance. When I think about energetic balance, I think about how well I manage how much or how little I push my internal gas pedal. Do you always have your foot pressed to the floor or can you ease off and on as appropriate? And obviously, the metaphor is not about your car. I’m talking about your body’s energy flow.
Energetic balance refers to your ability to effectively “drive” your nervous system. Stress, anxiety, hectic schedules, food, and many other elements impact your nervous system in what is called sympathetic response. Take our “fight or flight” response. Useful in certain circumstances, but if you are activating this part of your nervous system too much, your body calibrates to this, producing hormones like cortisol to help you manage this class of energy demand. And this high-demand response leaves you less able to self-regulate your normal, everyday ups and downs. Remember, not every “up” or “down” requires a “fight or flight” response.
Your body has an amazing ability to be on the look-out for anything that could change or upset your balance. It’s a lot like the nursery rhyme: Peter and the Wolf. Sometimes Peter calls for help for no reason, setting the village alarms off and everyone runs to the rescue. Oops, false alarm. The problem is that when this continues to happen over and over, your body becomes hyper-vigilant and it can’t tell the difference between a real emergency (a real wolf) and just a little bit of stress (a neighbor’s barking dog). Over time, your body adjusts with an overly heightened response to stress. You become your own internal “wolf” always threatening an attack whether it means a weakened immunity, anxiety, panic attacks, asthma, high blood pressure, IBS, and the list goes on and on. Perhaps, energetically, you just feel a little edgy and you notice that you are not sleeping very well. These and other such signs can tell us we’re not in balance.
How do you become energetically in balance and learn to respond appropriately to stresses? The first step is to check in on your breathing. Self-regulation starts with befriending your body and mind through a correct breathing pattern. A correct breathing pattern is the most accessible way to help calm the nervous system and gain balance. Perhaps you’ve been to a fitness or yoga class and heard the instructor say, “Take a deep breath”. Deep doesn’t mean large or voluminous. It means that you should breathe so that your diaphragm stretches downward towards your navel allowing the tissues of the abdomen to get a massage with your breath. This also massages the lower spidery branches of the vagus nerve which helps to relax the body. The vagus nerve is part of the autonomic nervous system which allows your body to process stimulus either in sympathetic response (fight or flight) or parasympathetic response (rest and digest). This is a much larger subject than the intention of this article, but the important point is that correct breathing directly impacts your response to stress.
Good breathing habits can make all the difference in the world for managing anxiety, racing mind, common breathing disorders, and poor health. But most importantly, breathing habits effect your overall energy. Just by breathing correctly, you can sleep better, and awaken with a clear mind, ready to hit the ground running. Becoming conscious of your breathing (and breathing lightly), allows your mind to self-correct the messages and slow down reactions to stressors. It can be challenging to learn new breathing habits, but with practice and self-awareness focused on your breathing, you can make great progress in finding balance and good health.
Practice Exercise:
- Observe your breath. Sit quietly and observe your breath moving in and out.
- Do you breathe through your nose or your mouth? Or maybe some variation such as in through your nose and out through your mouth?
- Count how many breaths you take per minute.
- Breathing through your nose both in and out, can you slow down your breathing such that you feel like your inside air pressure equals the outside atmospheric pressure. This takes some concentration and you might feel some air starvation until you get used to it. Try sustaining this for one minute or more.
Next month I’ll talk more about breathing patterns and practice.
Tamara Gillest, MS, Certified Yoga Therapist, E-RYT-500
Owner of BendnMove Yoga and Movement Studio, West Seattle, www.bendnmove.com
tamara@bendnmove.com, 206-697-4399
Tamara has her Master’s degree in Science and is a Certified Yoga Therapist and Educator of Yoga. She currently offers individual and group yoga therapy sessions, as well as Buteyko Breath Education at her studio in West Seattle. Tamara collaborates with health care professionals to support and improve individual health and quality of life with a non-invasive, nurturing experience.
