This practical, accessible breathwork guide delivers a complete program of exercises, inspiring true stories, prompts, and more to give readers the skills they need to build and maintain a healing breath practice.
Imagine having a powerful wellness tool at your fingertips. A tool to keep you calm, increase energy, clarify your thinking, release muscle tightness—even give you a youthful glow. A tool that enhances and improves physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health and well-being, always at the ready whenever you need it. It’s not some miracle app. It’s your breath. And all you need to do is learn how to harness its power—its innate wisdom—which is exactly what Margaret Townsend, who has been a practicing breathwork facilitator for 30 years, teaches readers in The Breathwork Companion.
We learn the best ways to wake the body up in the morning and tune it down at night. How to strengthen the mind-body connection to boost the immune system and decrease inflammation. How to help with specific emotions including anger, fear, anxiety, worry, sadness, grief, fatigue, and stress. How to increase self-compassion and find a calmer, more balanced, steady state. Even how to breathe better while wearing a face mask.
The breath is one of our greatest natural resources. Given that we inhale and exhale roughly 20,000 times a day, we have countless opportunities to make the most of it. Here’s how to start.
Breath is our most intimate relationship with life, but as we age and experience the challenges of being human, we unconsciously learn to breathe shallowly by tightening our bodies and holding our breath to avoid experiencing painful or unsafe feelings. These responses to everyday obstacles we may encounter, to chronic stress, and to traumatic events can become habitual over time. How we breathe affects how we experience life, and this book is here to help us fix our breathing, change our energy state, and connect to our whole brain, sense of well-being, and more. Connecting to our breath is integral to our health and well-being. And The Breathwork Companion will teach us how and why.
Through exercises, inspiring true stories, prompts, and more, The Breathwork Companion gives readers the tools to build a steady breath practice to help heal and comfort. There are practices for waking up the body in the morning and for turning down the body at night; for partner breathing, a side-by-side breath bath; and how to soothe the body following trauma. In these challenging times, Townsend reminds us that we can always rely on our breath for comfort, empowerment, and self-compassion.
An approachable and practical guide for using the breath as a support for healing and self-compassion.