How to Make the Most of Your Breathwork Practice

Practicing breathwork is as simple as showing up, bringing conscious awareness to the breath, and letting it guide us. But when you’re practicing unguided and alone at home, it can sometimes feel like you aren’t doing it right, or that you need a little extra guidance. We decided to put this blog together to help you make the most of your practice.

The meaning of the word ‘Intention’ is; a thing intended, an aim or plan.
Setting an intention means to bring your attention and awareness to a quality or virtue you wish to cultivate.

Try choosing something that has emotion, something that means something to you, something that resonates, that inspires you. This can be the vision for your exploration.

Expectations can have the tendency to push away possibility in breathwork. It’s important to reclaim and bring a sense of innocence and curiosity as to what might arise, rather than an opinionated mind filled with expectation. Transform your expectations into expectancy and enter your breathwork practice with an alertness that’s ready for something to happen, but without need for anything in particular to happen. Trust the breath and its wisdom, it tends to bring the things we’re ready to experience.

You may find there’s a rush of emotion or feeling that comes when you breathe. It usually takes just a few breaths for things to start to happen. When we breathe, we bring a lot of new energy into the body—breathe, life force, divine force—and as it flows through our body it increases the blood flow to our brain, which lights up our bodies with all different kinds of physical sensations and emotions. You maybe find this is an opportunity to award yourself away from time from the hustle and bustle of life.

During a breathwork session, half the time is spent bringing in spirit with an inhale and the other half is spent expiring spirit with an exhale. When we consciously give our awareness to this birth and death cycle, we get to live it in the space of 10 seconds. We can use it to ask ourselves, which parts of me feels alive right now and which parts are ready to die, to be let go of? You can’t merely keep bringing more furniture into the room. It will eventually fill up. We have to get rid of some furniture in order to allow the new in. Unless we’re prepared to let go of what’s comfortable, we won’t make room for anything new to come into being.

When emotions come up, feel them completely and at the same time, bear witness to them. We want to be in it, but not of it. This equanimity is a spectacular quality to develop in life because when we do this, it means the shocks, bumps, and bruises we face don’t need to be so damaging. Once we establish this level of awareness and equanimity, we can tend the parts of our being that need support and help; hold our wounds with love and compassion and not indulge in our story. This is how we truly heal.

If you’re interested in practicing breathwork in a guided way but from the comfort of your own home, join us for our free Breathe The World session every Sunday. Register here: http://alchemyofbreath.com/breathwork-webinar/