Deep breathing relaxes the mind and body

Your breath gives you life

If you haven’t heard of the great benefits of deep breathing, it’s worth learning about this.

The practice of deep breathing stimulates our parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), responsible for activities that occur when our body is at rest. It functions in opposite to the sympathetic nervous system, which stimulates activities associated with the flight-or-fight response.

By voluntarily changing the rate, depth, and pattern of your breathing, you can change the messages being sent from the body’s respiratory system to the brain. In this way, breathing techniques provide a portal to the autonomic communication network through which you can, by changing your breathing patterns, send specific messages to the brain using the language of the body, a language the brain understands and to which it responds. Messages from the respiratory system have rapid, powerful effects on major brain centers involved in thought, emotion, and behavior.

In this Huffington Post article Get a Hold of Yourself: 3 Kinds of Breathing, it teaches 3 kinds of deep breathing techniques.

1. Coherent breathing – breathing slowly at a rate of five breaths per minute.  Simply count silently to yourself from one to five while inhaling, and the same count while exhaling. Changing the rate of your breath in this way maximizes the heart rate variability (HRV) and causes a shift in our nervous system.
2. Resistance breathing – creating a resistance in the flow of air by pursing the lips, placing the tip of the tongue against the inside of the upper teeth, hissing through the clenched teeth, tightening the throat muscles, partly closing the glottis, narrowing the space between the vocal cords or using an external object such as breathing through a straw.
3. Breath Moving – using your imagination to move your breath through your body.

There are so many types of breathing techniques, and for different purposes.  I do the coherent breathing because it simply feels good, it immediately relaxes me, and is easy to fit into my day.

Paying attention to your breath is a wonderful way to practice mindfulness as well.

In many traditions, the word ‘breath’ means the same a ‘spirit’.

Most of us hardly breathe at all. We hold our tension in the body and breathe shallowly.  Breathe!

Breathe, stay present, and enjoy life,

~Wendy

Mindfulness towards your significant other

Divorce and breakups seem to be all around us. I was just thinking that in my circle of acquaintances alone, I have learned about 5 breakups/divorces just in the last few months. Western society does pose a lot of challenges to a relationship.

So how do you keep your relationship with your significant other fresh and alive?  I admit, sometimes there is good reason for a breakup to happen, but in this post I’m focusing on relationships that are heading for, or already are in, a state of boredom or lifelessness that can be avoided with care and attention.

It absolutely does take ‘work’ to keep a relationship alive and fulfilling. Especially when children are in the picture, they become the focus of your attention and your relationship with your significant other drops down on the priority list.  I’m sure you have heard of lots of good advice, like ensuring there is open and frequent communication between the two of you, building and keeping trust, and doing things that allow you to grow together as a couple. I think all of these are important.

But I would like to offer some mindful ideas that perhaps may not be as mainstream or cliche…

Don’t you find that after you have been together for awhile, you tend to take each other for granted, and your focus of interest starts to divert to other people or activities?  Here is where I think mindfulness can really help freshen your relationship. Here is a way to cultivate more joy into your relationship.

When you are with your partner, really be present for that person. Give him/her your full attention, and try to approach every interaction you have with him/her with fresh eyes and non-judgment.  A simple concept, but it’s not easy to do!  Just think about this – we all have preconceptions about our partners which brings prejudgments into our interactions with them. Such judgments and expectations can be a self-fulfilling prophecy because you already are seeing the interaction through a judgmental lens. Sometimes we barely give a situation a chance because we’ve already played out the scenario in our heads before it’s even happened and ‘we know exactly how the other person is going to behave.’

Consider talking about this approach with your partner to see if you can both do this for each other. Start small – you don’t have to put pressure on yourself to do this every time, but try it and see if the outcome is different and better.  Even a small gesture conducted in a meaningful, caring & present way will be noticed. Some examples:

• Listen to what he/she is saying with full attention, eye contact, watching their body language, and trying to detect their emotions. Be selfless in this interaction. No judgment, just observation and acknowledgement.
• When you have friends over and you’re offering them a drink, ask your partner what he/she would like too, treating him/her in a way that shows you are paying attention to them too.
• When you together with others in a group situation, listen to your partner just as you would listen to others – don’t interrupt, correct, or argue – give your partner your attention and respect his/her opinion.

In other words, be present and non-judgmental for your partner.

If you feel like you are in a rut with your partner, see what you can do to change what you are bringing to your interactions. Often when you change your behavior, it affects the behavior of your partner.

~Wendy

You are not the only one with problems

We all do it sometimes. Putting on a happy face.

If you ever think that most people ‘have it together’ and you don’t, think again.

A typical day for me usually involves helping people with their personal issues, be it anxiety, stress, relationship issues, feeling stuck, health scares, uncertainty about their future, etc.   I must confess that I have been surprised numerous times when someone whom I thought had a perfect life comes to me for a confidential talk, and I see the public persona come down and their real life presented to me.

In helping so many people over the years, it’s become very clear that everyone has issues in their lives. Even those people who appear to be very ‘together’ – perhaps people see them as good-looking, happy, confident, having a beautiful home, great partner, money and a fun social life – often underneath all of that are personal problems that no one knows about, at least to some extent.  Or maybe they are doing great for awhile but then something happens to knock them off track.

I have come to realize that we are all human, meaning we are all having the human experience.  There is no understanding happy without ever being sad, no love without hate.  We move in and out of phases in our lives, and we need to be grateful when we have special people in our lives who come on the journey with us.

I hope this gives you some perspective – that you are not the only one with issues to work out in your life and that you’re missing the secret to being happy.

This coming weekend is Thanksgiving weekend for us here in Canada.  I am giving thanks for all the gifts people have given to me – entrusting me with their deepest thoughts and opening their hearts.

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving everyone,

~Wendy

Dalai Lama quote

It takes practice and intention to notice your life in the present. But the present is exactly what is real and what we have right now.  Do not waste your life away with worry about the past or the future.

The present moment – capture it, notice it, savor it.

Learn to find what is good, right now.

~Wendy