The nature of your breath is fundamental to how health expresses in your body. You are designed to breathe as a whole.

Optimal breathing creates a whole orchestra of motion throughout the body. This happens when your body is internally free to do so. You most likely breathed like this as a baby, when you were less impacted by living life, especially life in the 21st Century.

To come back into whole body breathing, you need to do supportive practices (movement, awareness, and breathing), and be supported by body-centred somatic practitioner to resolve the overwhelm and trauma held in your system.

Meet your Many Diaphragms

Your respiratory diaphragm is a muscular dome attached at the base of your rib cage. As you breath-in, the respiratory diaphragm moves downwards. The downward motion massages your internal organs. This important motion stimulates healthy movement in all your organs.

With your in-breath there is an expansion of our whole torso – for example, your pelvis and shoulders move in a coordinated way with the breath.

As you breathe outwards, the diaphragm moves upwards, and the body pulls inwards as the air is expelled from the lungs. It’s as if the body becomes taller and thinner.

In a body that is internally free, there is a lot of synchronised movement happening within the body as you breathe. This movement is occurring in relationship to a whole range of other diaphragms that include your:

• Crown (top of the head)

• Tentorium (a membrane holding the brain in place)

• Cranial base (bottom of the head)

• Shoulders

• Pelvic Floor

• Knees

• Soles of the feet.

When you have a refined sensitivity to your body, you can tune into these diaphragms and actually feel these movements happening. This can all be discovered through your own inner sensing.

Impact of Trauma and Holding Patterns on your Breath

Trauma really changes your relationship to breath. When you are frightened, you hold your breath.

For people who have experienced traumatic events or developmental trauma, chronic holding patterns can develop limiting how you breathe. You literally hold yourself still in your muscles, fascia, bones, and so on. This holding occurs when you have not processed and released overwhelm and trauma.

You contract your body for a wide range of reasons. For example, as you grew up maybe you:

• Did not want to take in any more of the smoke or toxic emotional states in your home environment, so you breathed ‘as if to keep the air out’

• Were so scared at times that you froze, and the stiffness has never gone away

• You didn’t want to cry as children because it was not welcomed, and so tightened up your diaphragm to stop this happening.

Whatever the reason, your body is restricted and therefore not expressing optimal health. You can also learn to contract as adults too. There are seemingly benign reasons for holding yourself in. Dr Libby Weaver gives the example of wanting a flat belly, to look slim and attractive. Or perhaps you want to wear trousers or skirts that require you to squeeze yourself in. So you pull in and stay pulled in – cutting our breath off from your whole body.

The impacts of contracting your breath are profound. Contracting can become a limiting patterning within our body that is locking in our health and potential.

FELT-SENSE

You can know where you might be on the continuum of healthy breathing, by using your internal felt-sense.

When you have chronic holding, your felt-sense of breathing can actually disappear. You don’t feel you have a respiratory diaphragm, never mind any other diaphragms. There is no sensation. You may be confused about what happens to your diaphragm when you breath in (e.g. does it go up or down?) as you have no direct sense of this part of your body. You are oblivious to what is happening inside. This is a natural effect of trauma on your felt-sense.

As you tune in and explore your breath, you might notice that your body feels contracted and tight. As if your skin and muscles do not have room to move. You might also find that no amount of stretching will open this tightness up.

Maybe you have stubborn aches and pains that simply don’t go away. This may be because the body needs to process the trauma that it is holding on to. This processing needs sensitive attunement and isn’t something that can be pushed or imposed. Your body has to open, much like a flower opens its petals.

You may believe that it is impossible to feel or change your contractions. In essence, you might give up on yourself by dismissing the relevance of this patterning for your health. And yet you are always changing, and your body wants to become free. So, the potential is always there for things to open up and become freer for you.

HOW IS YOUR BREATHING?

• Can you tune into the movement of your respiratory diaphragm? How does it move?

• Does your breath feel silky, smooth and even? Does it feel stuck somewhere? Is your breathing full and easy?

• If you tune into all your diaphragms, how do these move? Can you feel your pelvic floor ‘breathe’?

Coming Back to Optimal Health

Your body is remarkably adaptable. It is possible to come back into relationship with the experience of your breath. As you do, your breath changes. Your awareness of this impacts your physiology, and the impact is both relaxing and grounding.

To have that direct felt-sense and direct knowing of your own breath as a gentle rhythm (filling up and widening in your whole body, then pulling inwards and back out again) connects you to your health and present time.

In time your breath can also synchronise with your energy field. Then, it is possible to feel that you are being breathed. This experience is counter-intuitive because of all your conditioning about what you think breathing is. Your body feels deeply nourished when this happens.