A lot of times, people fail to notice how important it is for us to have an optimized breathing practice in order to live the life we’ve always wanted to live. We’ve had this thought for so long that breathing is something we’ve been doing so easily all these years that it already appears to be something we don’t need help with.
Did you know that by actually paying attention to the way you breathe and doing it in a way that is aligned with your dreams, you can actually change your relationship with the stressors present in your life?
We all deserve to live life in abundance and bliss – the life of our dreams! No one wants to be in the exhausting circle of stress and end up losing against unhealthy habits.
Join us as we interview Caroline Gamble, the Founder of The Breath Method who’s passionate about helping people reach awareness towards both the beauty and power of breathing.
Caroline Gamble is a trained and certified Respiratory Therapist. She is the Founder of The Breath Method, a clinic and an app that is created for breath education and optimization. Caroline also is the head of breathing for Thrive Global. She interacts in that space with many people from many walks of life including major CEOs and executives, informing them of the world of breathing and how we can harness that towards health and well-being.
In this episode, Caroline discusses the importance of optimizing our breath and shares practices we should try in order to properly align the way we breathe into the life we’ve always wanted to live.
What you will learn from this episode:
- Understand how giving attention to the way you breathe can change your relationship with your life’s stressors;
- Discover the reason behind the necessity of understanding the mechanics of why belly breathing is important;
- Find out tips on how you can optimize your breathing through four simple steps that are proven to help you live life in better health.
“Whatever health goal we have, it needs to start with your breath.”
– Caroline Gamble
Valuable Free Resource:
Caroline Gamble’s Steps on How to Optimize Your Breathing
- Have breathing practice every morning. Set your breathing, connect with it, and start to reform your breathing habits by just five to 10 minutes of breathing with these four steps.
- First, breathe through your nose with your tongue up and wide, and notice how it’s easier to get your breath lower into your lungs. Make sure you’re sitting up tall and comfortable. Have your knees lower than your hips if you can. Close your eyes before you do this.
- Second, imagine your awareness going down to your belly. As you breathe in, push your belly forward to stretch the skin of your belly and pull your belly backwards as you breathe out. Repeat it three times more. Now let go of all of that force. Just allow the belly to gently move forward as you breathe in and gently return backwards as you breathe out.
- Third, take your hands to your lower ribs, fingers pointing forward and the thumbs on your back. Step three is that diaphragmatic breathing of step two, but also feeling the back of your lungs breathing.
- Fourth, hold your body again, just as your hands were before, and feel a slow expansion into your fingertips and your thumbs. Make that expansion smooth. Feel this in the motion of your abdomen expanding as you breathe in, and returning in which as you breathe out. Slow, smooth, steady.
Topics Covered:
04:17 – Yoga and Breathing: What Caroline has learned from the Yogis in relation to the connection of yoga and breathing
08:28 – Stress isn’t necessarily a bad thing: The parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system of man
12:36 – The switch: Breathing up into the chest and why we’re stressed about it
18:36 – Caroline is human as well: A personal story of Caroline and her experience
22:07 – The first of four: Breathe through your nose with your tongue up wide
25:28 – The second step: letting the force in your belly go
34:36 – The third step: Feeling the back of your lungs
38:09 – The fourth step: Make the expansion slow, smooth, and steady
47:12 – Tight bellies are a fallacy: How pulling up bellies affects our breathing practice
50:16 – Box method: More into inhaling and exhaling’s connection with the way our body functions
54:40 – Caroline’s resources: The Breath Method and free consultations
Key Takeaways:
“Yoga is so much more about the yoga that we do in modern studios around the world. Yoga is all about breath.” – Caroline Gamble
“Stress is not necessarily a bad thing. We need to be able to pop into stress, and then we need to be able to shift into relaxation. We don’t want to be more dominant in stress. We want to be somewhere between the two – in that relaxed, calm state where we can engage with a book, we’d be able to concentrate our mind, we’re not so relaxed that we’re falling asleep but we’re not so stressed that we have that monkey mind – that agitation.” – Caroline Gamble
“If you want to evoke a sense, an aura, a feeling in your system, make your breath really represent that feeling that you want.” – Caroline Gamble
“All these little ways, you can become your own healer. You can correct the tension and the course that you are on by just becoming aware.” – Caroline Gamble
Ways to Connect with Caroline Gamble:
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