It's still and always will be about the breath.

I've been a fitness gym rat all my life. For years, my gym friends begged and waited for me to become a certified personal trainer. I never did. Years after my body building experience, nutrition obsession and lots of weight lifting, yoga appeared into my life. I was as unwilling a yoga recipient as any other right minded gym rat. My first yoga class brought on by unrelenting back pain from the birth of my third child found me laying on my back while the yoga teacher taught us how to breathe. It was life changing and what created a cascading eventually leading me to becoming a yoga teacher.

Through yoga, I've learned how the mind and body are interconnected. Research shows if you can train the body to breathe deeply in times of stress the mind can follow suit for forming new neural pathways to better decision making. The breath really is the key to the practice of yoga. Ha! And we thought is was about a series of shapes we make with our bodies! Well, it sort of is about that too. In our physical practice, we can put our bodies into stressful positions for the sole purpose of focusing on controlling our breath. You can remind yourself in perceived danger that you are safe, again, and again and soon your neurological response is hardly a blip on the fight or flight screen. 

Thanks to our environmental stressors and social pressures to look trim, we've lost the instinct to breathe slowly, deeply and fully. If we're not practiced in taking in slow, mindful belly breaths in times of stress, we take in shorter sips of air through the mouth using the neck and shoulders. Long term shallow breathing can have a serious impact on our health by disrupting our immune and digestive systems, our cardiovascular health and opens us up to injury by relying on the tiny muscles of the neck and shoulders and chest to do the job meant for the diaphragm. Recent studies also show a strong connection between nasal breathing and cognitive function, suggesting conscious belly breaths through the nose increase attention and focus, making responses easier to find in place of impulse reactions.

Practice deep belly breathing. Use your diaphragm and strengthen your core to maintain a posture that invites breath all the way down, filling your lungs completely. When we're not meeting on the mat, take a few minutes out of your day to bring awareness to your breath and body. Bring order back to the chaos of a stressful experience and ultimately improve your overall health and wellness. Our thoughts and our lives are built on our consistent choices. What can we manifest if we paid attention to each one with a single breath?

Breathe well.