BREATH CONTROL AND LIFE CONTROL

Your nervous system is your entire experience of life. It is every memory you’ve ever had; every dream; every sensation; every thought. And we believe we have no control over that experience. But you do have control; and it’s through your body, and it’s aligned with how you are built.

Peace and joy and creativity and love are our birthright; they are what our nervous systems want. But we don’t know how to make those happen at will. So we spend so much time “trying”.  Exhausting.

And we end up chronically Ill from having life flipped on us with always-on demands: 95% fight flight, 5% rest and digest.

But our evolutionary biology is built for it to be the opposite: meaningful, sharp attention for purposeful action, and then significant time for restoration and growth.

We have failed to listen to our internal signals.  The ones that say “enough. rest.”  We grind through. We are really good at grinding.  We give it high value.  We think cortisol always high is normal.  It isn’t. It kills insulin and inflammation control pathways.

So what’s a person to do?  Take pills? Have procedures?  Just accept that falling apart in midlife is the deal?  Is there nothing in our control?

There is so much that is not in our control. And I learned this through my own suffering and feeling helpless and increasingly angry and disempowered, watching family members get sicker and sicker, and my own health tumbling alongside. My ambitions getting smaller. Feeling like this can’t be life. This can’t be the whole deal. I was made for more than this. What is in my control?  Turns out, how I experience life is in my control.  

So my work now is to point people to their own power to control their experience of life, right now; not through any mental “efforting” or program. But through your own body’s built-in mechanisms.

And breathing is the remote control of your nervous system. And heart-rate variability (HRV) is the index of your nervous system. Change your breathing, you change your HRV, and you change your resilience and your experience of the moment.

‍