You can watch this video on Spotify in your app or here on the blog and have a few laughs. 101 Things I wish my Dad Taught me. Episode 51. Are you alive or barely breathing. Bought to you by Universal Law of Nature Number 4. Abundance.
Well, good day and welcome.
Transcript of video.
This is Chris. And we’re talking here today about, are you alive or barely breathing? And this the one this is number 51 in the SUSE of 101 things I wish my dad had taught me. My dear old dad rest in peace. Well, dad, wasn’t a big one on breathing. I can tell you that for a fact, he didn’t do a class in yoga and wasn’t all that sporty. But he huffed and puffed his way through life.
Are you alive or barely breathing? I think we are now being taught by yogic systems and Wim Hoff and the rest of the gang, how to breathe, which was once upon a time, really natural.
I find swimming is a great teacher about this topic because I go swimming. And if the waves are big, I start puffing even though I haven’t done anything exhausting. And it just reveals to me, my psychology and my breathing rhythm are absolutely connected. We know that a person in shock will breathe in harshly and struggle to breathe out. And a person who’s feeling full on and depressed will breathe along external exhale who for me.
So we know that emotion and breathing are absolutely connected. So in fact, we can figure out our emotional state by changing our breathing state. If you breathe in a longer inhale and you breathe out and exhale, you will excite yourself. You’ll agitate and become more awakened. So quite often before a speaking engagement or before giving my beautiful partner a hug or something, I might go And I’ll warm myself up.
If it’s before a speech and I’m nervous before that speech I’ll have a cup of coffee. No, I won’t. I’ll, I’ll do some breathing practice to slow my heart rate, and you can slow your heart rate by breathing a very long exhalation and not worrying at all about the inhalation.
So for example, if I’m riding my bike and I’m in in on a mountain or doing something of that nature and it’s causing me to be short of breath, I will focus very much on the exhale. I will X Usually try to do it through my nose where I don’t want to blow bogies all over the screen right now. So the breathing practice and the psychology of where we sit are absolutely connected and fear, guilt, anxiety, worry, sleeplessness, it’s all breathing related.
And so the study of breath, which in yoga is called pranayama and all, and all the apps that you can buy around this topic of breathing for psychology are brilliant, are brilliant ways to control the tone of your own mind. And if we can’t control a ton of our own mind, life dictates to us how we’ll breathe while other than us dictating how we breathe to live our life.
Now, this is very important stuff, very, very important frustrations, emotions and things that come up during the day are food for evolution. But there are also things that we can dictate we can control. If we lose control of them, then we need to go to the discard form and the emotional shower. But for the majority of things, we need to focus on breathing.
My ex partner was an athlete who was struggling with breathing control. And so she had to wear sticky tape across her mouth every night. And you could say for me, that was a curse or a blessing, whichever you want to make the joke about. But the fact of the matter is you have to type her mouth before she went to bed and forced herself to get used to working with her breath in and out through the nose, even during her sleep. And the objective of that is to deepen her sleep. Now it worked, I can honestly say she started off at one level and went to another level before giving up on it.
The other thing we know about breathing it, it changes nostril every 30 seconds to a minute of our lives. We breathe in one side out the other in one side out the other, and then it changes. It goes the other direction. And one of the nadis, so Nana it’s called in yoga. One of the practices is to move your breathing from one nostril to the other consciously, and this balances, the mind and balances the body. And it’s a great practice to do if you’re feeling a bit agitated, NAATI sadhana, but there’s many other there’s a breathing practice where you work like the bellows there’s breathing practices you can do to control and focus the mind.
And we’re not going to talk about them here suffice to say that would be a great piece of personal development. Great piece of self-leadership that you can do, whether you’re in corporate or at home, and to monitor your breathing.
When you’re having conversations, monitor your breathing. When you’re watching TV, monitor your breathing. Certainly if you can engage in good, healthy breathing while you sleep, you’ll be doing yourself a big favor.
This is Chris.
You have a beautiful day.
Bye for now.
