Breathe For Wellbeing

In this short talk, we explore the breath as a living, responsive force that supports us throughout our lives. Although breathing happens automatically, it reflects everything we experience—stress, rest, emotion, and physical effort—and is deeply connected to the nervous system and the mind.

This reflection looks at how cumulative, everyday stresses subtly shape the way we breathe, often preparing the body to fight, flee, or freeze without us realising. By bringing gentle awareness to the breath, we can begin to reassure the nervous system, soften patterns of tension, and shift how we meet our experiences.

Nothing outside of us needs to change. Instead, this talk invites a change in perception—creating more space, ease, and choice in how we respond, and opening the door to a quieter, more grounded way of being.

Transcript

Hi and good morning and welcome to this short talk on the breath and how it can support our well-being.

Well,

The breath is absolutely extraordinary and breath meditations can support our well-being in so many ways.

This breath,

This life force energy that we have has been with us from the moment we were born to the moment we take our last breath and it often goes unnoticed.

I know some people that even in their 50s and 60s haven't really taken any conscious breaths.

So,

If we think of breath,

We are thinking of part of our autonomic nervous system.

It is the part of our nervous system that reacts automatically in our daily lives and because it happens automatically,

It very rarely gets any conscious attention and if it does,

It's usually because something is faltering it.

So,

You know,

If it's taken away,

If we're underwater,

If it's restricted in some way.

But we don't give it any notice in our daily lives and there's very little conscious attention of it and yet this life force energy responds to absolutely everything that goes on in our lives.

It's crazy,

Right?

So,

We don't pay attention but it responds to every little nuance of every little thing that happens in every part of our day and night.

So,

We can be stressed,

Have physical exertion,

Rest or sleep or there could be things going on around us and we're scanning around and our emotions are triggered for whatever reason and our breath responds to that as well.

So,

If we think of the breath and it's constantly adjusting and acting to balance the force to get some equilibrium,

To bring us back to homeostasis,

Should we say.

So,

Some sort of balance in whatever is unfolding on our outside world or even on our inside world,

Our body and our breath is always responding in that moment.

Yeah?

So,

When we think of our modern,

Busy,

Hectic worlds that are full of endless to-do lists,

Things that we have to achieve,

People we have to please,

Difficult people,

Difficult situations,

We kind of begin to realise that it's not just the breath working on its own.

The breath is woven into the passage of what the mind is doing and the mind is always active too.

Always scanning,

Always looking,

Always trying to keep us and steer us away from danger and protect us.

So,

Because the breath and the mind are intrinsically woven together in moments of stress or discomfort,

The breath responds in relationship to the mind attempting to help us to cope.

And this is just fantastic,

Like survival mechanism.

But in our busy and hectic worlds,

We quite often carry stresses and discomfort and worries that the mind kind of tries to steer us away from,

Causing us more stress and our body reacts in a stress response.

Many of these stresses that we carry aren't acute or life-threatening,

But they are cumulative and so we're not belittling them,

But they're more like these smaller,

Responded,

Repeated pressures that affect us day to day.

It's just like being pushed.

Each of these little pressures creates a subtle poke,

Poking the nervous system.

And the breath,

As I mentioned before,

Adapts to be able to set us up to respond to this.

So,

You might notice that you may hold it or breathe higher in the chest and or its quality is more edgy.

Tension can quite simply shape the way that we breathe.

And as a society,

Quite often we're so used to this tension that we're breathing up into our chest on a daily basis with not bringing the air deep into our bodies.

When we breathe into our bellies,

For instance,

This is how we breathe when we're a baby.

And this is how we breathe when we feel really safe.

But we've got into a habit of breathing into the chest.

And when the body begins to breathe this way,

It prepares itself to run,

To fight,

To flee.

So,

It triggers this fear response that something needs to happen and we need to prepare for this danger.

And you may have heard time and time again that this is a really helpful tool if we were in prehistoric times when the saber-toothed tiger was going to go and come and get us.

We would absolutely need to prepare.

But,

You know,

Having suffered from anxiety on many occasions in my life,

I could have been lying in bed and felt that same fear.

You know,

What am I scared of?

The duvet?

The curtains?

Yet the anxiety and the fear that I felt in my body was absolutely real.

So,

By gently bringing awareness to the breath and inviting softness into it and to breathe into different areas of the body,

We can begin to build some self-induced reinsurance that we are safe,

We are held.

And that we,

In our own bodies,

Can begin to meet this moment and we do not need to prepare with such an extreme response.

As we breathe softness,

The nervous system begins to settle.

And as the nervous system begins to settle,

So does our experience.

And this is when the big healing and approach to our own well-being begins to soften every molecule in our body,

Open up again our airways,

Our vessels that carry waste products.

So,

We are able to breathe in a safe way,

So we're not carrying that tension.

So,

As we look around and we've responded with breathing in a new way,

Nothing outside of us needs to have changed,

But our perception shifts.

It's like,

Ooh,

Our capacity to meet what is here grows and we find more space and more choice,

More gentleness to respond.

And beauty begins,

You know,

Soon after the softening begins in our own internal landscape.

We begin to really let go.

And this softening begins something,

It's like tendering the soil,

This new seed being dropped in.

We begin to see new possibility,

Opportunity.

We're giving ourselves the time to release and let go.

And we can approach the unfolding of what's going on in our worlds with a fresh approach,

A fresh approach within the experience itself.

So,

This approach to the breath is in one way really simple.

And in another way,

A little complicated,

But when you just take the time,

Just a little bit every day,

Maybe five breaths in the morning,

Five breaths at lunchtime,

Five breaths in the evening,

You're giving yourself a little bit of space and you can expand in this in a later date,

But giving yourself a pause to go,

Okay,

I see you,

I hear you.

Anyway,

I hope you enjoy this short talk on breath and wellbeing.

And yeah,

Thanks for listening.

Bye for now.