Gaining Personal Power! How to heal and age healthy.
Have you ever slowed down enough to feel your breath? Feel the inhale through your nose and the exhale. The sensation you feel as your heart space fills up with such life and the sensation of that energy traveling to your head. A natural action that we often take for granted. There is beauty in the breath, and it has the power to heal you if you are open to develop a relationship with nature’s life force.
Your breath is connected to the impressions your brain processes throughout your day and life. Impressions are your sensory (sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell). This is how you feel your way through life, by your impressions. When your breath and impressions are in sync with each other creates a healthy mind-body connection. When there is a disconnection between your mind and body physiological discord happens leading to aliments, disease, and effects on your mental health. The first impact this has on the body is the nervous system. Which starts in the brain, down your spinal cord, then branches off from your spinal cord and extends to all parts of your body, controlling your automatic response to the world around you. Common side effects of sensory overload or stress to the nervous system includes:
Digestive problems, anxiety, depression, sleep problems, weight gain, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and addiction. Your breath and nutrients co-create in healing your life, you need to breathe and eat to live. How you breathe and what you eat directly impacts the prosperity of your life and your mental well-being.
The nervous system and digestive system are directly connected to each other. The nervous system produces saliva and coordinates with the digestive system so food can be broken down and metabolized moving nutrients throughout the body. Your digestive tract is often called in healthcare “the second brain” of the body. Sensory overload and stress to your nervous system and digestive tract causes digestion to slow down. The sides effects of stress to your digestive tract include weight gain, gastrointestinal issues, IBS, GI disorders, brain fog, anxiety, and depression. Reducing stress to your nervous system and digestive tract lowers inflammation in the gut. Eating a non-processed organic diet high in fruits, vegetables, while staying well hydrated will give your body the nutritional foundation to better manage your sensory stresses. Focus on fresh organic fruits and vegetables high in prebiotics and probiotics that promote and support the healthy bacteria in your GI tract. Fruits and vegetables with inulin, like asparagus, bananas, garlic, and onions, contain prebiotics. Fermented foods like kefir, kimchi, kombucha, natto, sauerkraut, tempeh, and yogurt all contain probiotics. A healthy diet high in prebiotics and probiotics balance the bacteria in the gut microbiome creating an ideal environment for the digestive system to flourish and breakdown nutrients.
The world around you is full of sensory overload from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed. Your life can be full of demands of work, family life dynamics, and on top of those demands you are on overstimulation from social media, listening to the radio, watching television, and surfing the web. This creates a sensory overload to your impressions in the brain leading to self-esteem problems, comparing yourself to others, ping-ponging thoughts, and a pendulum thought process of the ego that overtasks your nervous system. So how do you center yourself re-establishing your relationship with your “True Self”? It is in your breath that holds the power of healing your overactive thoughts and reconnects you with your relationship with yourself.
Breathwork is an exercise that improves your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health that can easily be incorporated into your daily life. It is an ancient medical technique that has been used by doctors and practitioners for thousands of years and has been proven to have a wide variety of health benefits. This makes it one of the most natural methods of treating a variety of health issues linked to nervous system overload and the body’s response to stress. One of the top benefits of practicing breathwork is decreased levels of anxiety, helping to cancel out your fight-or-flight response by grounding your mind and body. This informs your nervous system that you are safe. Other benefits of breathwork are that it boosts your immunity, lowers blood pressure, improves circulation, enhances your mood, helps build confidence, self-esteem, self-image, and self-love. If you are struggling with negative thoughts and feelings, especially self-directed thoughts, breathwork will help guide you back to a sense of peace. This creates space to nurture a healthy relationship with your “True Self” building your happiness within and balancing your response to environmental sensory overload.
The foundation to healing your life is through your breath and your nutrition. Together they repair your nervous system and digestive system impacting your health psychologically and physiologically. When the nervous system and digestive system are in a harmonious relationship between each other you are in homeostasis (balance). This provides you with the clarity to feel your environment and the impact it has on your sensory impressions. You will notice what feels calming to the nature of your “True Self” and what surroundings or conditions create disharmony to you mind and body. This will provide you with more personal power over your life to heal and age healthy.