La conciencia respiratoria es clave para adaptarse a diversas actividades de mayor o menor energía, actividades más rápidas o más lentas, desafíos físicos y posturas variables.

Spend a week or two with the following sheet in your purse or pocket. Get to know better how you feel by what effect various conditions in life have on your breathing.

Your breathing will naturally reflect or be affected by everything you do. The bigger the breath the bigger the life. But sometimes a smaller or erratic or shallow breath gives us a valuable clue that something is needed to be attended to. Rational fear would be one example.

The breath should be able to adjust to different activities based on the need for more or less energy, faster or slower activities, physical challenges and varying postures.

Atrophied diaphragms, stiff chests, over tight accessory breathing muscles, constricted neck, inadequate nutrition, negative cellular memories of traumatic events causing muscular hyper-constriction create breathing blocks. The before-mentioned breathing blocks allow interference in the natural maximal/optimal reflexive process to occur.

Awareness and redevelopment of the breathing process are ultimately the responsibility of each breathing person. Most are largely uneducated about what breathing looks, feels, sounds and acts like.

Our primary, secondary and college levels of formal education can and should take responsibility for that education. However, it will always be up to the individual to take charge of their life (force). To be really alive at one hundred and five, you’d better learn to breathe better now. If you wait for more clinical studies to prove the value of optimal breathing you may never see the results during your lifetime.

Health professionals can refer to additional factors in the HEALTH PROFESSIONAL BREATHING ASSESSMENT INDEX in the Secrets of Optimal Breathing manual.

COPING

People with detected or undetected suboptimal breathing may tend to avoid adequate physical activity, becoming increasingly less confident in themselves and more dependent upon others.

Their level of fitness and overall wellness can become stifled or deteriorate, adding to or creating clinical problems. Becoming more aware of the dynamics of breathing is the first step toward addressing it.

Use the following scale as a basis for your answers and to help track your progress as you follow the recommended program(s), exercises, environmental controls and follow-up sessions

Read each numbered item below and over the days, weeks and months ahead, begin to notice how these situations positively or negatively affect your breathing. Does it become harder, easier, slower, faster, in the belly, high chest, fuller, shallow, deep, or whatever. This may take several days, weeks or months to become familiar with.

(a) = Shallow
(b) = Harder
(c) = Faster
(d) = Slower
(e) = Deeper
(f) = Belly
(g) = Chest
(h) = Cough
(i) = Hold breath
(j) = Erratic
(k) = Easier
(l) = Smoother
(m) = Forced
(n) = Other________________

• When I become too tired.
• When there is humidity in the air.
• When I meet someone I am not sure or do not feel good about.
• When I go into cold weather from a warm place.
• When I experience emotional stress or become upset.
• When I go up stairs too fast.
• When I try to deny that l have respiratory difficulties (if you do of course).
• When I am around cigarette smoke.
• When I become angry.
• When I exercise or physically exert myself.
• When I feel distressed about my life.
• When I feel sexually inadequate or impotent.
• When I am frustrated.
• When I lift heavy objects.
• When I begin to feel that someone is out to get me.
• When I yell or scream.
• When I am lying in bed.
• During very hot or very cold weather
• When I laugh a lot.
• When I do not follow a proper diet
• When I feel helpless.
• When I drink alcoholic beverages
• When I get an infection (throat, sinus, colds, the flu, etc.
• When I feel disconnected from everything and everyone
• When I experience anxiety.
• When I am around pollution.
• When I overeat
• When I feel down or depressed.
• When I breathe improperly
• When I exercise in a room that is poorly ventilated.
• When I am afraid.
• When I experience the loss of a valued object or a loved one.
• When there are problems in the home
• When I smile.
• Share a feeling
• Laugh
• Cry
• Feel love for someone
• Feel good about myself
• Have lots of energy
• Feel powerful
• Sing
• Sports
• Special Activities__________________________________