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Notice how you breathe.

Do you take deep belly breathes throughout the day? With each breath? Or are you a shallow chest breather?

During my professional massage training years ago, I’ll never forget how often our instructor would remind the class, “BREATHE, you are NOT breathing.” I’d catch myself and realize that while concentrating, I’d take quick shallow inhales. I actually believed that this was the correct way to breathe, having never taken a class on breathing before. I couldn’t have been more wrong. 

I also discovered that I held in my stomach as I inhaled. In a moment of reflection I noticed that I felt self-consious when my stomach was extending. Sometime over the course of my life my brain picked up on the social pressure to be thin and translated it to keeping your stomach firm, and tight even while breathing. Anectdotal research has shown that I am NOT alone. Countless woman feel the same way, and breathe in a similar fashion. An example of social conditioning at its worst.

To infuse your body with the life giving properties of oxygen, you should be able to feel your breath deep down in your belly. The stomach should extend outward, rather than being constricted inward. The inhale ought to feel natural, not forced (unless your stressed), and your belly filling with space.

This type of breathing does many things for you, but I’ll just name a few.

• An increase in energy. Picture a helium balloon that is on its last day of a three week stint, flat and lifeless. Refill it with and it will once again rise and soar. So too will you as you acquire this new method of breathing. You’ll find you have more energy just by changing and being more aware of the way you breathe.
• Less stress and anxiety. The fight or flight system is less activated when we breathe deeply. In many cases, the stress response is actually reversed by breathing deeply. Researchers note that people are able to connect better with their cognitive reasoning part of their brain when they are less stressed than when a person feels anxious.

 Just a quick note. When you first start changing the way you breathe, it may feel forced, contrived and even uncomfortable. You may even feel light headed, especially if you are a typical shallow breather. This is normal and will resolve itself as you continue to practice breathing the way our bodies were designed.

In contemplating the idea of decluttering to discover untapped energy and create movement, one area which is frequently neglected is our virtual lives.  A few examples include our home or office computer files, emails, cell phone contact lists, and even our web presence. We get busy, quickly creating data without analyzing how the data should be structured. This chaos creates a web of disorganized information which can really slow you down. The benefit of of taking a “pause” and looking at the time spent on virtual tasks opens the window of awareness.  Each time we work with archaic or disorganized technology, time is lost and productivity decreases. Technology was designed to increase our productivity rather than decrease it. Over time we can become oppressed by the very tools that were meant to free up our lives. (Ask me sometime why why I chose to leave the IT world behind in search of a fuller, more abundant life!)

With that said, I have made the decision to move from form to function as a means of allowing technology to be synergestically entwined with my life vision. In the past, our website was updated using MS frontpage and Adobe photoshop. This tied me to a particular computer in my home office. By moving to a content management system (CMS) website and wordpress blog, data can be posted on the fly from anywhere in the world. This mobility allows for faster accessibility and presentation of information.

I’m embracing the changes, and hope you will join me as I provide you with many new features in the coming months ahead.

Here’s to an organized and progressive virtual life!

Cosette