Medicinal Breathing is one of many long sense forgotten healing practices from millennia past.
Other terms for medicinal breathwork that you may or may not have heard of are Qigong, Holotropic, Breathing Meditation, there are several variations of this and it has been used in meditation since meditation became a practice.
What’s drawn my interest into breathwork did start at the amount of information I had gradually seen more of through the years. Interest for me started with my mother’s research with animals and peroxide, which is literally oxygenated water. More on that another day. All though I am not certain what triggered me to actually start this practice, I have known about it longer than I have practiced. As of today, I have been practicing breathwork for about a month now.
So far, my experiences have been positive.
To help you see the type of improvements, we will have to talk more about a few of the struggles I have had with my health. Overall, my experience has been extreme fatigue, muscle weakness and muscle pain. Doctors call this an auto-immune disorder that is causing bouts of inflammation throughout my whole body.
This has caused crohns, gallbladder problems, appendix problems, rheumatoid arthritis, erythema nodosum and a list of other things that have been an ongoing battle for most of my life. Now doctors have no idea on the why for any of this. However, I have been able to identify a pattern to all of it.
The instinct for most nutritionists, doctors, and holistic practitioners would typically jump to diet. While diet is a huge part of our Health and Wellness overall, I identified my biggest trigger to be stress. It was hard to ignore when stressful periods would also see me in the hospital. While I was born with health problems, they were under control for many years. Many years until I found myself as a young and unhappily married individual. Our relationship was incredibly unhealthy for the both of us. The results for myself from this marriage were six surgeries, the loss of years worth of time with my very young babies due to repeated hospital stays, and years of crippling pain.
How did I identify the trigger?
It wasn’t too difficult, really. Patterns arose. They were easier to identify than food triggers which I had been trying to identify for most of my life. The best we had ever done with identifying my food triggers was an organic food cleanse when I was very young. The best that identified was diet soda is the devil, and food coloring and preservatives suck.
Let us step back though. Medicinal breathing, healing breathing, is the act of properly oxygenating the body or more importantly your cells. You need to think beyond your lungs, beyond your muscles, and even past your blood. Oxygen is absorbed by every cell and optimized by every cell in the body. Science has proven that most all disease, viral or bacterial diseases as well when stopped early enough, cannot survive in an environment with a proper pH balance, which means a properly oxygenated environment. There are a handful of methods for oxygen therapy, the greatest of tools we were born with and we were even given two, our lungs! So this is what I set out to start studying.
Several books have dove into this practice.
A few I might recommend to you would be Just Breathe by Dan Brule. I relate to this one because I have found breathwork to impact every aspect of my life, not just my health. Flood Your Body With Oxygen by Ed McCabe dives into a lot of great points. The list is pretty long. Here are a few resources to get your research started.
Books that discuss Oxygen Therapy and the Health Connection
Books that discuss and teach Breathing Techniques to heal and balance your life
While there are a lot of breathing methods, there are three breathing meditations I use regularly. By regularly I mean at least 4 times per week, more when I can. I encourage everyone to seek out new methods, find what feels right for you. For me YouTube has been great for this. What isn’t on YouTube?
Here is some breath medicine via few YouTube options for your healing breath today.
Breathe strong and journey on.