M6 : Lesson 6: Breathwork Overview and Basic How-To Guide
Breathwork is one of my favorite tools to help process trauma and stuck energy in the nervous system.
In this lesson, I give you an understanding of different types of breathwork, ranging from practicing calming breathwork to activating/advanced breathwork.
It’s important to find a breathwork practice that is appropriate for your current nervous system’s capacity to process intense emotions/energies.
Please see the Module 6 Workbook for Lesson 6 materials.
Transcript
Less than 6. Breath work overview, and basic how to guide. I love breath work so much, and there’s so many different options to learn from. In regulate module 3, we discussed some of my favorite basic go to practices that build a healthy nervous system response. But there are a lot of other practices to choose from that I wanted to let you know of.
I wanted to bring in breath work into regulate because There really are a lot of practices that can be confusing of which one do I do. And sometimes, I know for me, I’ve tried practices that flared me and at the time I didn’t know why. So I’m gonna explain all of that to you here. And since we just discussed trauma processing, I wanna say that I think breath work practices are a very valuable skill to have if you have a history of trauma. The deal is to find a practice that helps you be present in your body, process emotions, but isn’t too stimulating for you if you’re at an early stage of healing.
So this is the first thing I want you to know. Use discernment when you’re doing breath work. Some practices can really push you into a sympathetic nervous system state. And if you’re not able to regulate, it can have adverse effects. Like I said, certain breath work can bring up on process trauma.
So be sure to be resourced and capable if you’re doing advanced intense practices, which I’m going to describe in a moment. Please find a practice that feels resonant for you and stick with it for a while. I’ve changed my breathing practices over the years to adjust to my current goals. And when I wanted to simply calm down and engage my parasympathetic nervous system, I use a lot of the basic breathing like you’ve already learned in module 3, such as heart map, mindtobreathing, voo breath and you also learned the physiological sigh in module 6. But later in my journey, I wanted to use my breath to help me pull up and process some suppressed emotions.
So I chose a different practice that’s more intense, which I’ll describe in this lesson as well. In this slide, we’re going to have an overview of the difference between parasympathetic breathing and sympathetic breathing. Parasympathetic breathing is great for the beginner because it’s about calming and being able to come into more presence. Which like I said, we learned with the heart math, the vu, the mantra breath. We also learned the physiological sigh earlier in module 6.
Box breathing, which I’ll demonstrate in a moment, the 4, 7, 8 breath, which I’ll also talk about in a moment, alternate nostril breath, and the putecho breath, which I particularly loved when I was dealing with anxiety and panic disorder. Now we also have advanced breathing techniques that are causing your sympathetic nervous system to act actually be more dominant, and you’re probably like, why would I want that? Well, I’ll explain it in a little bit. But the sympathetic dominance is gonna stimulate and uproot and help you to process deeply held emotions and triggering energies but with more presence, and some examples of advanced breath work would be the very popular Wim Hof breathing. Something also known as Tummel breathing, the breath of fire, which you might hear from Kundalini, yoga or holotropic breathing as well, and another pattern that’s also called detox breathing.
The buttecco breathing can also be a type of advanced breath as well. Before I get into the specifics of the various breath work practices I just mentioned, I want to go over how breath work at this stage of your journey in the regulate program is a vital component to start adding more into your daily practices. Breath work really helps to repattern some of those protective responses that we’ve been discussing in the trauma module. I’d like you to consider using a 3 to 30 minute daily breath practice. The breath practice is gonna help with many things, but most important certainly.
It’s gonna help you be more present, more grounded in your body. And, yes, you already are doing a little breath work with part b of ABC for a minute or 2 or maybe the vu breadth, but I’d like you to consider adding more time to your breathing practices. This is going to continue to help calm down your limbic system protective response. And at this point, we want to start processing some of the suppressed or repressed emotions and energies and disengage even further from mental looping. But most importantly, at least for me, breath work has helped me to respond differently when I’ve been triggered by taking 5 or 10 minutes and going into a room and breathing when I’ve been really activated.
And then I come back out and respond to my family from a whole different mindset. I recommend taking the time to start implementing this practice. Now you might be thinking that we’re doing so much already. Well, here’s what I recommend. At this stage of regulate, please consider using a prolonged breath work session at least 5 minutes in lieu of Part c of ABC one time a day.
That’s right. You can replace your visualization of Part C with a prolonged breath work session daily. Now, I don’t want you to replace part c entirely because it’s still important that you are doing some creative visualization to help continue with your neuroplastic change. So I wanted to go over a few of the parasympathetic examples, and then I will go over an advanced breathing technique. So like I said, you’ve already learned heart math.
You’ve learned vu breathe. You’ve learned the mantra breathing. You’ve learned the physiological side. Those are 4 patterns that you should know very well by now and hopefully you’re using from time to time. So let’s talk about box breathing.
That’s one of the other very popular breath patterns to just help you get regulated. It’s very simple. It’s about having an equal inhale and equal hold an equal exhale and an equal hold. That’s why it’s called box breathing because you’re doing a breath pattern in like a box fashion. So we’re gonna do this together just a few times so you can get an idea about it, and then I’ll teach you about the next breath.
So we’re gonna breathe a 4 second inhale, a 4 second hold, 4 second exhale. 4 second hold. And I’ll just kinda create the box pattern in front of me while we’re doing this. Ready? So breathing in through the nose.
Here we go. Inhale 4 seconds. Hold. 4 seconds. Exhale.
4 seconds. Hold 4 seconds. Inhale. Hold. Exhale.
Hold. One more time. Inhale. Hold. Exhale.
Hold. You don’t have to draw the box in front of you. I was just doing that so you could get a visual of what the breath breath pattern is like. So that spot’s box breathing, and it’s a very popular technique. I’ve heard they even helped to train some of the navy seals using that breath pattern because it’s just great to give your nervous system a type of steady awareness of the breath and kind of a focus point.
One of the things about box breathing that I recommend doing is to see how how long, how many box patterns, you can focus on your breath only without thinking about other things. Meaning, can you get through like four times in a row of going inhale hold, exhale hold without thinking of anything. And ideally work up to 10 breaths in a row where you’re doing the box without thinking. And it’s a real challenge. I know for me at first I could get through 2 and that’s about it.
So this is also a way to build mindfulness. So breathing and mindfulness, and it’s just a great all around breath practice that I recommend playing with for a while. Okay. The other thing I mentioned was something called the 478 breath. It’s an ancient pattern where you’re basically breathing in 4 seconds, holding for 7 seconds, and breathing out for 8 seconds.
The difference between this and the box is you’re not you’re not holding after the exhale. So it’s Inhale, hold. Exhale. Inhale. Inhale.
Hold. Exhale. So 4 second inhale. Hold for 7, exhale for 8. So let me guide you through this a couple times.
We’re not gonna do full practices because I just wanna be able to get through all of these and then you can do them on your own, whichever one feels best for you. It doesn’t really matter. Just pick 1 and work with one of these parasympathetic patterns or just continue with the ones you’ve been doing. I just wanna speak to these. So here we go.
Inhale, 4 seconds. Hold for 7. Exhale for 8. Inhale for 4, hold for 7, Exhale. 8.
One more time. Inhale 4. Hold 7. Exhale. 8.
That’s the 478 pattern. They recommend do that four times. I really like it. I used that one for a while right before I would eat a meal. I just felt like it really brought me into the present moment.
Okay. The next one I’d mentioned was the alternate nostril breathing pattern. This is another ancient yoga breath that’s very simple and can be really helpful as well when you’re feeling anxiety. So what you’re gonna do is you’re gonna be breathing in one side of the nostril and then breathing out the other side. So you’re gonna take turns, breathing in and out of each nostril.
So let me explain how you do this. So let’s start by breathing in, closing your right nostril, and breathing in through the left. And so let’s just do an equal breath of how about let’s just do 4 seconds in and 4 seconds out. K? So we’re gonna breathe in through the left, and then we’re gonna close the left and breathe out through the right, and then we’ll breathe in through the right close the right and breathe out through the left.
So it’s kinda like inhale one side out the other. And then from that same side, inhale, and then out the other, and then it repeats. Okay? So it’s a little tricky at first to know which side, but just follow along and I’ll guide you. So left nostril open.
Right is closed. Inhale 4 seconds. Close the left nostril out the right 4 seconds. Now keep this the same and now breathe in the right nostril 4 seconds. And close the right nostril, breathe out the left 4 seconds.
And let’s repeat into the left, Close out the right. Into the right, close the right, and out through the left. And you go back and forth. And actually, when you’re doing this, I usually just go back and forth. I hold like this, and I’m just holding one nostril.
And I’m just going back and forth like this with my hand. Okay? So that’s another one. There’s a lot all of these are on Google and you tube so you can look them up here. I just wanna give you an explanation.
And so those are the basics of the breathing pack practices except for the butte go technique, which I recommend looking to understand that from someone who’s certified to teach it, which I am not. Legally certified to teach that to you. So I’m not gonna fully teach it in this program, but I wanna personally say I use the butteco technique especially early on in my brain retraining when I was dealing with anxiety and panic disorder, and it was very effective for me. There’s a book by the name of Patrick McEwen. He writes a lot of books on Buttego, and he has a book on anxiety.
He also has lots of books on training and high altitude training, so it can also be an advanced technique. But the idea behind you, Tycho, is having prolonged exhales and learning how to tolerate a build up of carbon dioxide in your system to help you to become more efficient with oxygen. So it’s kind of counterintuitive because we often think, oh, I need a big breath beauty goes the opposite. You actually take a small breath and you practice holding on the exhale to build up your carbon dioxide side and what happens is there’s a feedback loop in the brain that basically tells your brain, you know, you’re you’re safe because you’re not hyperventilating. The brain will often monitor your breath as an indicator of if you’re stressed.
So typically when we’re stressed, we hyperventilate. We actually are building up oxygen. That’s why you pass out. So with Buttego, you’re starting to build up carbon dioxide which sends the message to your brain, oh, I must not be stressed right now because I have more CO2 than oxygen. And so for me, it really helped me to deal with panic and anxiety disorder.
So look into that. You can Google it. There’s books, but I’m not gonna teach it here on regulate. And Next, I wanna talk about advanced breathing practices. Advanced breathing practices help you to increase your capacity to tolerate a stress response.
It gives your brain a new interpretation of what the stress response or the sympathetic activation means in the body. In other words, it kinda resets what your body and your brain has considered to be stress. You see, typically, our heightened sympathetic response is associated with fear. I’m not okay. I’m running out of my body.
But if you can stimulate that sympathetic response with presence, I am here, I’m breathing, I’m safe, It can rewire what that sympathetic response means. And then a lot of times your subconscious starts to Trust that you can handle some of those suppressed emotions and those will start to come up, which they do need to come up to heal them. Remember, the only way through is going inward. And so there are a lot of techniques that are out there to help with this sympathetic activation And the issue that I see is that some people go ahead and do these things because they’re popular and they do have all sorts of health benefits and they think, oh, I should go do Wim Hof breathing or I should go do hall of traffic, but you’re not somebody who can self regulate your nervous system at all, and you don’t realize that these things will likely produce a pretty big anxiety reaction if you don’t have nervous system regulation so it can backfire. I know because I did that many times before I could handle doing sympathetic breathing.
You’re also gonna have some weird sensations in your body when you do the advanced breath work. You probably feel tingly. Your hands might even start to, like, clamp like this. You’ll feel all sorts of things because there is an adrenaline that’s running through your system. But you’re doing this in a calming way, meaning you’re choosing to do it and staying present.
These kind of breath patterns off also stimulate and help with immune system activation. So people will claim that there’s all sorts of health benefits there. Like I said, it’s likely that some trauma may come up to be present because you’re showing your nervous system that you’re choosing to handle the stress response. And you’re choosing to recreate a new association. So just know that you might cry, you might yell, you might have memories pop up, So this is something where you do this incrementally, and you don’t do this right away if you’re still on very, very level 1 nervous system regulation.
Maybe or somebody who even has to go through level 2 a full time before trying this kind of breath work. But I do want you to know how to do it. I do want you to understand it because it’s some it’s a tool that I think will be great for you to have at some point in your journey. Okay. So I wanna Try to summarize this a little bit so that you really understand standing breath work.
Yes. We’re trying to initially calm ourself down with breathing practices. To engage our parasympathetic nervous system. And that’s a very important tool. But for full nervous system regulation, We need to teach our brain and body how to be in a stress response and to be able to return back to calm.
How to be in a stress response and feel safe at the same time. So that’s part of what we’re doing with this type of advanced breath work. So as you’re doing the advanced breath work. Think about this that you’re building a container where you can be present, aware, you can stay connected to yourself, while your nervous system is getting purposely put into a stress response or you’re purposely bringing up those intense emotions. One last thing about advanced breath work that I think is pretty amazing is that you can even activate the release of DMT, which is the psychedelic compound that causes your brain to slightly hallucinate and have all sorts of interesting experiences.
So do know that breath work can cause you to have deeply spiritual experiences without ingesting drugs like LSD or plant medicine. I’ve had these experiences myself, and they’re amazing, but I couldn’t have tolerated them too early in my process if I was just not able to self regulate. So do use discernment and do know that I think that breath work can even replace a lot of the benefits that a lot of people are finding from plant medicine and psychedelics in my opinion. And with that, in the next section, we will go through a full advanced breath work process. And if you’re new and you’re not sure this would be right for you.
Just listen and just watch, and you can come back to it at another time. So I’ll see you in the guided practice.