Breathing & Breath work.
Something I've noticed over twenty years in medical practice: people expect a breathing technique to magically change something.
To be fair, it does. Real physiology, real shifts. Heart rate variability moves. The nervous system settles.
I use breath work as a significant underpinning in the work that I do, and I've watched it change lives.
But that's usually not how it's being used.
What I see more often is breathwork as a dream concept. A ritual standing in for the areas of life that just need attention.
The conversation that doesn't happen.
The sleep schedule.
The meals.
The marriage.
Ten minutes with an app in the morning, and the day's hardest thing stays exactly where it was yesterday.
It becomes a distraction, the way meditation sometimes can be, instead of doing the thing.
The Yogis have known this for a very long time
It's why the traditions insist it's not enough to just do the prayer/affirmations/mantra. You must do them, and then you do the movement (action). You do the thing.
Do the mantra alone and you can expect changes, but you'd best be prepared to wait. Years. Lifetimes, maybe.
The practice was never designed to replace the action. It was designed to prepare the one who acts.
That's the piece that goes missing. Somewhere between the church, ashram and the app store, the preparation got sold as the destination.
Meditation done in excess, especially in avoidance of the thing that needs doing, can be a very dangerous distraction. I find many people are using these concepts exactly that way, and often without knowing it.
The practice feels productive. It photographs well but can be the most sophisticated procrastination tool available.
The mechanism, not the magic
Here's the distinction that matters.
An unregulated nervous system running at full effort is a two-cylinder weed whacker: loud, straining, and going nowhere fast. A trained one is a twelve-cylinder engine that hums at high speed instead of straining.
The breath, paired with real concentration, is how you shift the nervous system into the state where the work can actually get done. That's the mechanism. Not the magic.
The people who get results do the meditations, do the breathing, do the mantras. But then they do the thing. And they will spend way more time doing the thing than they did the others.
It is real work, and not sexy. Unless of course you consider discipline sexy.
If you want the breathing rhythm I use, it's in my free brainwave breathing guide. Then go do the thing.
Wishing you and your family the best in health,
Dr. Lorn Allison, DN
