People benefit profoundly from giving more attention to their breath. Focusing on the breath brings calm through the cancer journey and in daily life. Breathing techniques are essential to support people affected by cancer—for cancer patients during and after treatments as well as cancer caregivers. Breathing can be one of the simplest and powerful strategies for health and healing.
How does breathing relate to health and healing in body, mind, and spirit?
Breath is your life force. Respiration gives you life. Rhythmic inhales and exhales help regulate all of the functions in your body. Inhales provide life giving oxygen to your cells. Exhales expel the waste product carbon dioxide. Breathing with deep, balanced inhales and exhales has other benefits such as improved blood circulation, a stimulated lymphatic system, and balanced nervous system.
The mind is often practiced in monkey chatter. Our attention and sense of self is scattered when we are thinking too much. Focusing on breathing moves people into a more relaxed state with self-awareness. When people get into the habit of it, the breath becomes an anchor. Conscious breathing helps people be in the present moment, in the here and now. Deep breathing is an invaluable resource during stress.
High quality breathing is connective. The rhythms of your breath create key supportive architecture between your mind and body. Breathing creates a bridge between your mind-body with a grounding anchor that supports union in your body, mind, and spirit.
What are some breathing techniques?
Breathing techniques help people to move beyond shallow breathing into deeper breath providing essential support to body, mind, and spirit. You can develop a tool bag of breathing practices or find one approach that works for you.
Deep Breathing vs. Shallow Breathing
Your quality of breath impacts your attitudes and activities, or how you think and what you do. Observe this relationship in yourself. Notice the difference between shallow breathing and deep breathing. Shallow breaths are tight and restricted. How does shallow breathing influence your functioning moment to moment? How do you communicate, relate to other people, work, plan, think, and feel? Poor qualities of breath limit thoughts, feelings, and movement. Deep breathing supports relaxation and clarity guiding you in your decision-making through cancer and in life overall. Calm breathing supports a calm, centered presence with clear thoughts. Connecting with your breath also helps cultivate stronger awareness for your quality and expression of experience in daily life.
Breathing with Awareness
Tune into the relationship between your breath and mind. Tune into the relationship between your breath and body. Tune into the relationship between your breath and spirit. Let your awareness follow the rhythms of your breath.
Breathing with Repetition
Breathing techniques are sometimes used with the silent repetition of a word, sound, phrase, or prayer and the passive return to the repetition whenever other thoughts intrude.
Breathing through Exercise and Movement
Use exercise and movement practices to tune into, deepen, and literally workout your breath.
Music and Breath
Different types of music support the breath and movement in the body. Research studies indicate that some breathing and relaxation techniques are enhanced by music.
What is the Soft Belly breathing technique?
The Center for Mind-Body Medicine teaches a slow deep-breathing technique called Soft Belly developed by James S. Gordon, MD. The soft belly meditation calms the vagus nerve, which stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system to control the relaxation response. Relaxing the vagus nerve supports the lowering of cortisol levels and inflammation.
Try the online version of Soft Belly: a Four Minute Practice in Relaxation guided by Dr. Gordon with images and sound.
You can also practice the technique yourself through these instructions.
- Close your eyes, breathe deeply, in through the nose and out through the mouth.
- Imagine your belly is soft; this deepens the breathe and improves the exchange of oxygen, even as it relaxes your muscles.
- Say to yourself “soft” as you breathe in and “belly” as you breathe out.
- Continue this approach for 5 to 10 minutes daily then add another minute or two over time.
- Do this two or three times daily—not right after meals, you may fall asleep—and at bedtime, if you are having trouble sleeping.
- Use a timer (but not at bedtime) so you are not preoccupied with how long you’ve been doing it or how long you have left.
- Soon, you’ll find that in times of stress you can take a few deep breaths and say “Soft…belly,” and relaxation will come.
How does breathing support detoxification?
To support detoxification, air should be inhaled through the nose and exhaled through the mouth. The nose acts as a filter and blocks harmful particles in the air from entering the body through breathing.
What is some of the science about how breath creates balance in the mind-body?
Breathing techniques restore and maintain balance in the body. Research by Candace Pert, PhD demonstrates the mind-body connection and how breathing supports health and healing.
“Conscious breathing causes peptides (chains of amino acids that create the bridge between the body and the mind) “to diffuse rapidly throughout the cerebrospinal fluid, in an attempt to restore homeostasis, the body’s feedback mechanism for restoring and maintaining balance. And since many of these peptides are endorphins, the body’s natural opiates, as well as other kinds of pain-relieving substances, you soon achieve a diminution of your pain. So it’s no wonder that so many modalities, both ancient and New Age, have discovered the power of controlled breathing. The peptide-respiratory link is well documented: Virtually any peptide found anywhere else can be found in the respiratory center. This peptide substrate may provide scientific rationale for the powerful healing effects of consciously controlled breath patterns.”
-Candace Pert, PhD, Molecules of Emotion
