Doing Yoga Breathe For Better Living

My, how wonderfully we are made.

To do this deep breathing, find a comfortable seated position and sit up tall. My yoga instructor tells us to inhale slowly to a count of five, starting at the belly. Expand the belly, then the chest and feel the breath come all the way up to your shoulders. Sort of like an elevator. Hold it for a few counts, then exhale to a few counts. When exhaling, pull in the belly like a bellows to expel all that carbon dioxide.

Try to find some time each day to practice breathing. Maybe put up some sticky notes to remind you: “Breathe.”

The most natural way for me is while walking. I synchronize my steps with my breath.

I like to think there’s more oxygen outdoors where the trees and plants are doing their brea

Does it not feel so life-giving to turn off the AC and fling wide the windows? To drink in great gulps of fresh air?Do you want to buy the cheap yoga mat?

“Breathe,” my yoga teacher instructs throughout our class. Do we really need to be reminded to breathe? Don’t we just breathe naturally?

Well, yes. And no.

In a 2005 review of several studies, Richard Brown and Patricia Gerbarg, both of Maryland, found that yoga-type deep breathing was effective in treating depression, anxiety and stress-related disorders. The breathing techniques can be used - either alone or with other treatments - to treat many psychological disorders, eating disorders and obesity.

Just breathing?

Marcelle Pick, a doctor with the Women to Women clinic in Maine, writes that many of her patients show abnormally high levels of carbon dioxide in their blood, even when the rest of their results are fine. That tells her that her patient is not inhaling enough oxygen or exhaling enough carbon dioxide. This can often result in fatigue, mental fog and decreased tissue function. So she tells them they need to breathe.

The problem is we don’t breathe deeply enough. We need “belly breathing.”

It worked for me when I quit smoking years ago. Whenever I wanted a cigarette, I did some deep breathing. The extra oxygen brings a sense of calm with energy.

“I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.” (Psalm 139:14)

One of the best things aerobic exercise does for you is up your heart rate and force your lungs to take in more oxygen while expelling more carbon dioxide, Pick says. This gives your heart a good workout and pumps a quick jolt of oxygen through your cells.

It unclogs your thinking too. I get my best ideas while walking.

On the other hand, over time, shallow breathing or chest breathing causes a constriction of the chest and lung tissue, decreasing oxygen flow and delivery to your tissues.

Deep, rhythmic breathing expands the diaphragm muscle, the cone-shaped muscle under your lungs, expanding the lung’s air pockets, invoking the relaxation response and massaging the lymphatic system, Pick says.

Just as the heart is the pump for the circulatory system, breathing and movement is the pump for the lymphatic system, which carries toxins away and out of the body. Pick calls it the body’s sewer system. It moves out the waste from our immune system, including dead white blood cells, unused plasma protein and toxins.

thing, too. They’re exhaling the oxygen that I inhale and inhaling the carbon dioxide I exhale. Sweet.