Performance enhancement: Why deep earth breathing?

Who has time for a daily practice of deep breathing and meditation? I never did. I was rarely able to incorporate a consistent daily practice into my life. I viewed it as one of those nice things to do, but not a necessity. And even with the best of intentions, my deep breathing/meditation was always the first thing to get dropped when I was busy.

However the more I’m understand how the Sympathetic/Parasympathetic nervous system operates and how survival terror gets triggered, the more I’m coming to realize how important incorporating a daily practice of deep breathing and meditation is into our lives – even if it’s just for 10 minutes.

You can’t perform at the highest level when part of you is in survival terror. And it’s when we are in the Sympathetic Nervous system, the Fight, Flight, Freeze (FFF) and survival terror responses are triggered.

Robin Sands, author of Relaxation Reflex writes “The Sympathetic nervous system allows us to deal with stressful situations. Whenever we perceive danger it will tense our musculature, constrict our blood vessels and speed up our thinking process. Then when danger has passed the Parasympathetic nervous system will take over, decreasing heartbeat, relaxing blood vessels and clearing away metabolic waste products such as adrenaline and lactic acid.”

Unfortunately for most of us, this tends to be the exception rather than the rule. We are always running from one thing to another, stressed out – at least I always was. And “When people are ruled by their Sympathetic Nervous Systems, life slowly becomes more and more uncomfortable. Once in this vicious circle, sleep and appetite become affected. Alcohol and other kinds of suppressants may be sought.”

So how do you activate the Parasympathetic nervous system? It can be as simple as practicing daily deep breathing. Understanding that I can’t perform at my highest level if I’m consistently operating from a FFF/survival terror response, I have now become incentivized to incorporate a practice of deep earth breathing into my daily routine.

Find a quiet place, preferably sitting in a comfortable chair. Close your eyes, and imagine a place deep inside the earth’s core. As you keep your attention on the earth’s core, breathing deeply in through your nose,  imagine the breath moving up through the layers of the earth, up your left foot, left calf, left knee, left thigh and into your womb if you’re female or the base of the spine for the men. Hold this for a period of 5 seconds with your attention on your womb or base of the spine. On the exhale, breath out through your mouth, and imagine the earth breath going back down your right thigh, right knee, calf, foot and back deep into the earth’s core. Depending on how much time you have available repeat 10-30 times each day.

I’ve found over time, it’s more important to do some sort of deep breathing daily for shorter periods of time if I have a busy week, versus less frequently but for longer periods.

Happy performance enhancing breathing.

Julie-Ann.