The Simple Exercise That Can Transform Your Mind & Body In 60 Minutes
Unlock profound self-awareness and change using only the tools you already have.
Gladskikh Tatiana | Shutterstock We are taught hard work always pays off. If you want something and work work work, you will achieve it. All you have to do is pick yourself up and try again after you fail — and if you fail again, well, just try harder. The problem? It's not so simple and there are no guarantees. But that doesn't mean it's hopeless.
Sometimes trying as hard as we can is not enough. When you fail to make the change or can't work any harder to achieve the goal, something inside might be holding you back. Andrea Miller, host of the Getting Open podcast, explored this topic with Michael Stone, a Certified Holotropic Breathwork Facilitator, and learned a lot about how to transform her mind and body to reach the goals that truly matter.
How Holotropic Breathwork can transform your mind & body in 60 minutes
What is breathwork?
According to The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, holotropic breathwork is a "prolonged [3 hours or more], voluntary hyperventilation procedure, which might be useful in treatment of common psychiatric conditions such as anxiety and depressive disorders."
Michael Stone has a method to enter the same non-ordinary states of consciousness using Neuro Dynamic Breathwork, which is breathing for one hour, fast and deeply to music while a facilitator watches over you.
A significant difference from holotropic, and other styles of breathwork, and Stone's Neuro Dynamic Breathwork (besides the duration) is the facilitator doesn't direct the process at all. No suggestions are given. The participant also doesn't direct the process, but surrenders to whatever happens while doing the breathwork.
As Stone says, "It is about allowing whatever wants to happen to happen, letting life flow through you, and letting your inner guidance kind of run the show. That's what I loved, so I brought it back into my breath work, but I didn't like how holotropic breathwork was incredibly ineffective due to the time and financial investment involved."
How breathwork helps people transform
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Research from the APA helped show one of the things that happens in breath work is the quieting of the ego mind that puts you more in touch with your body, so you can start to make friends with emotions.
Every emotion has a message from your body. Nobody loves being anxious, angry, or the negative emotions. But, the more you can tune into your body's negative and positive emotions, the more you'll learn about yourself, and connect to your purpose in life.
The emotions in the body want to be heard, sometimes they can indicate a stress point leading to an ulcer, other times they can point out past trauma in need of acknowledgement.
The secret to making breathwork effective: showing up for yourself
Stone describes "The Inner Healer" or "Inner Guiding Intelligence" as something you have to feel so you can heal it.
Anytime you negatively suppress emotions into your body, not only does it create problems because your body has to spend so much of its energy suppressing these emotions, but it also keeps you from growing personally because you're constantly avoiding situations that could bring the same emotion, as explored by an APA study on culture-specific consequences of emotion suppression.
The fear is fear stored in your body, and we know from Babette Rothschild, the body remembers! This is why you can't have someone else guide you, you have to feel it in your body to recognize what needs to happen next. Everything you need to heal is inside of you if you listen to your body.
Breathwork allows the body to finally heal
The sympathetic nervous system is fight or flight, which is what anxiety is versus the parasympathetic, which is rest, digest, and feel safe. There is nothing safe about being in a sympathetic fight or flight state when you don't even know you are in it.
Somebody who's always in a sympathetic nervous system state breeds a negative cascading effect in themselves and others.
Research in Medical Hypotheses Journal on Pranayamic breathing demonstrated how "voluntary slow deep breathing functionally resets the autonomic nervous system [through] the role of the respiratory and cardiovascular system on modulating the autonomic nervous system."
If you're willing to do the breath-work, listen to your body. and be guided by the inner intelligence, the inner healer we all have, you can develop a better relationship with your emotions, interact deeply with other people, and experience a higher quality of life, even if it's, "Oh, I just feel good," and the acknowledgment of the emotion of safety.
Will Curtis is a creator, editor, and activist who has spent the last decade working remotely.