For a lot of us relaxation is becoming a luxury. We lead busy lives at a rate of knots constantly receiving visual, mental and emotional stimulation. Our days are filled to the max and when we do finally drop into bed our minds continue to whirl regardless of how much we’d like them to stop.

If this sounds familiar and you’d like to be able to ‘switch off ‘ and relax at will, you are going to love the effects of working with your breath.

The fact that western culture is so mentally oriented means that the vast majority of us ‘live in our heads’ most of the time. Energetically speaking, this attracts energy to the top half of our bodies hence our minds become super-stimulated with the lower parts of the body conversely being understimulated. This energetic imbalance is commonplace and lead to us becoming energy (and therefore oxygen) deprived in the lower half of our bodies as well as becoming increasingly disassociated from our physicality. The less we feel and connect with our bodies the less they seem to be an integral part of who we are which can provide an entry point for all sorts of self-defeating behaviours from poor diet and lack of exercise through to the more extreme such as addictions.

The good news is that this state of affairs is correctable and it begins, not surprisingly, with the breath. Learning to breathe deeply into the abdomen using your diaphragm is the first step to a more relaxed and healthy way of being. It continues to amaze me, and it seems my clients, that something as ostensibly simple as this can have such profound and life-altering effects. Breath is quite literally Life ! As such, the way in which we breathe determines how we live our lives.