Breathe better, feel better: Your body’s built-in reset button
Your breath is a powerful bridge between your physical body, mind, and nervous system. The following practices offer two foundational techniques to help you access and strengthen this connection. The first helps maintain the strength and mobility of your diaphragm, the central muscle in respiration. The second offers a grounding technique rooted in yoga philosophy to help you release overwhelm and restore calm. Both are simple, effective, and easy to weave into your daily routine or yoga practice.
A simple action to keep your diaphragm working properly
Your diaphragm is the primary muscle responsible for breathing. Like any other muscle, it contracts and can be controlled voluntarily. Maintaining tonicity in your diaphragm is essential for it to contract properly, moving downward during inhalation and returning to its resting position easily during exhalation. This allows for proper lung expansion and continuous visceral massage. Full diaphragmatic breathing exercises your diaphragm, but what’s the correct way to practice it?
There’s an ongoing debate in the yoga community about whether breathing should move from the chest to the belly or from the belly to the chest. However, there is one action that is even more crucial for optimal lung function and effective diaphragmatic breathing. Try this simple technique to help your diaphragm function properly. You can easily incorporate it into your yoga practice or daily routine.
Check out this cool video that demonstrates the movement of the diaphragm from every angle. Pay particular attention to the movement of the ribcage throughout the breath cycle – this is the action we are trying to support.
Grounding through the breath: A simple way to release overwhelm
According to the yoga tradition, Prana Vayu is the current of energy that governs intake—this includes food, water, air, information, and sensory experiences. Sometimes, we take in more information than we can process, and our minds start to feel crowded or overstimulated. This can be a sign that Prana Vayu is too concentrated in the head. To release this excess energy, we need to guide it downward—toward the belly, the energetic center of the body—and then gently discharge it into the earth. This can be done within a single breath cycle and repeated a few times for a more pronounced effect. This simple technique is especially helpful in stressful moments—during air turbulence, in a doctor’s waiting room, after reading a distressing news story, or anytime you feel anxious or overwhelmed.
