Breathing for Balance

Your beautiful breath brings fresh oxygen and life energy into your lungs to nourish your whole body system, and with every exhalation you release stale energy and carbon dioxide, eliminating toxins to make space for more energy to enter. This takes place every second of every day, keeping you not just alive, but healthy and vibrant. Most of the time, you don’t even think about it. From the first breath of life that filled your lungs, you have trusted the air to be available to you, for your breath of life, for your very life itself. That is an amazing and inspirational level of trust in something that you cannot see, touch or define. 

Energetically, your lungs are not just bringing in oxygen and releasing carbon dioxide, they are the carriers of your breath of life, connection, vitality, spirit, and inspiration. They're the part of your energy system that turns challenging emotions towards inspiring emotions, that turn traumatic experiences into amazing rich gifts for you to learn from. That all happens in this incredible alchemic system of your breath, breathing in, breathing out. 

Grief is an emotion closely associated with the lungs - grief of all kinds; for yourself, for where we are in our global connections and global awareness right now, for the places that you are suffering and experiencing pain, and for the places that other people and beings are suffering and experiencing pain. 

Sometimes that grief can feel so overwhelming, can't it? 

During October and November, some people notice that the emotion of grief intensifies, or that respiratory problems like asthma and chronic sinusitis can flare, but why?  Energetically, this all makes total sense as the respiratory system is intimately linked with the autumn, when the lungs come into their own rich vital energy - it is like they rule the body system for a few months. The health of your lungs at this time of the year can make all the difference between you experiencing an easy autumn filled with grace, or an autumn that makes you feel like you are coiled tight and trying to scratch an itch that can’t be identified.

I know which type of autumn I want to experience! 

I have a great course called Autumn Energetics that helps you align with autumn energy to empower your lungs, and bring balance, vibrant health and abundance into your life.

Join me for 31 days, and let's step forward into autumn together to invite in transformation at your deepest level of being.

I want to share a breathing practice that I find particularly beneficial – the Ujjayi breath, or Dragon Breath as I call it. It is an empowering, centring way to work with breath to affect whole system balance. It bathes the adrenal glands in revitalising energy, strengthening the Energetic Core and sending this strength through all of the other energy systems, including the Lung Meridian.

It is simple to do, and takes a little bit of practice to get it, but the benefits to your health make it so worth the exploration. Once you get the hang of it you can use it anywhere and everywhere.

There are three basic steps to working with Dragon Breath:

1. Gently constrict the back of the throat as you breathe in and out so that you hear and experience a very slight rasping in the back of the throat. To me it makes the same sound that you hear when you lift a shell to your ear and listen for the sea. Gentle, rhythmic, powerful.

2.  Imagine that you have a floppy balloon behind your belly button. As you breathe in the balloon starts to fill and you allow the breath to expand you in all directions. So the energy of the breath fills the belly, the ribs, the chest, the back, the sacrum, the pelvic floor, the waist, as you breathe horizontally, vertically, and diagonally.

3. Once you have worked with the two points above and feel comfortable with the constriction of the throat and the fullness of breath, then begin to work with the direction of the breath. Visualising the breath coming in through the feet, all the way up the legs, the trunk of the body and out of the top of the head. As you breathe out then allow the energy of the breath to flow through your Aura, back down to the ground.

Why ‘Dragon’? Well, for those of you who have heard the sound that a Dragon makes when it needs to increase its power you’ll know exactly why! When we engage in Dragon Breath our ability to interact with the energy from the Earth is greatly increased. We pull Earth energy up through our Kidney Meridian, which begins in the feet, and when we work with the Dragon Breath then it opens and activates that channel even greater. It looks to me literally like our bodies are sucking energy in as we work with Dragon Breath, bringing in that primal energy to revitalise the Aura and nourish the Energetic Core. If you want to be strong and resilient… enter the Dragon!

You can watch me demonstrate the Dragon Breath in the following video. You may also want to share this breathing technique with any children in your life, to help instil greater resilience in their protective auras during these challenging times.

With love, Prune