Transform your emotional state with breathwork. SoulSensei explains how conscious breathing can release stored emotions, promote healing, and restore inner calm.
The Power of Breathwork for Emotional Healing
Breathwork can be a powerful tool for emotional healing. Wellness experts have used breathwork to release emotions for centuries. When you focus on your breathing and slow it down, it can help relax the nervous system, release emotional blockages, increase self-awareness, improve emotional regulation, and promote trauma release. Let’s further understand the consequences of having emotional blockages to evaluate how breathwork for emotional release can benefit you.
Learn how to harness the power of breathwork in this short session with Prameet Kotak on SoulSensei.
Understanding Stuck Emotions and Their Impact
Stuck emotions or emotional blockages can be described as emotional experiences that are trapped or frozen in your body. These emotional blockages can be caused by past traumas, unexpressed emotions or stress-based emotions. When left unreleased, these blockages can manifest physically as pain, hypertension, fatigue and digestive issues. Emotionally, they can result in conditions like anxiety, depression, spiritual disconnection, attachment issues and mood swings. So, to live a happy life, releasing stuck emotions is necessary. And that’s where using breathwork to release emotions fits in.
What Is Breathwork and How Does It Help?
Breathwork is the practice of conscious breathing to enhance overall well-being. It involves intentionally altering your breathing pattern to relax your body. There are many different types of breathwork, some of which we will discuss below. When you use this powerful tool, it can help reduce stress and anxiety, enhance self-awareness, increase oxygenation, promote physical and emotional healing, improve sleep quality, boost mood and heighten focus and concentration.
Discover breathing exercises to release emotions in this short session with Karishma Kapoor.
The Science Behind Breathwork and Emotional Release
Conscious breathing can impact your nervous system, brain and body. Different parts of the brain are affected by the quality of your breathing. For example, shallow breathing can signal your amygdala, which is responsible for emotional regulation, to go into a fight or flight response. But deeper breathing can calm this area of the brain down, allowing you to respond more calmly and process your emotions better. Additionally, stimulating the vagus nerve in your nervous system through breathwork can help promote relaxation. Repeated relaxing experiences like breathwork and meditation can alter your neural pathways and train your brain to think more positively.
Breathwork regulates the production of the cortisol hormone, which is responsible for stimulating stress in your body. It can help release stored trauma by activating your body’s trembling response, which releases pent-up energy. Emotional release breathwork can also help you express your emotions better and process them efficiently. Lastly, breathwork strengthens the mind-body connection making you aware of your deep-seated feelings and emotions.
Explore this guided breathing exercise for stress relief with Prachi Mehta.
Breathwork Techniques for Releasing Stuck Emotions
Here are some of the most effective breathing techniques to release emotions:
- Holotropic Breathing – An exercise that uses rapid and shallow breathing to release emotional blockages.
- Rebirthing Breathwork – Uses conscious and connected breathing to release emotions.
- Box Breathing – A four-pronged breathing technique used to calm the body down.
- Pranayama – A yogic breathwork technique that involves breathing from alternate nostrils to balance emotions.
- 4-7-8 Breathing – Involves inhaling through the nose for 4 seconds, holding breath for 7 seconds and exhaling through the mouth for 8 seconds.
- Diaphragmatic Breathing – Uses deep belly breathing to release tension.
- Tummo Breathing – A Kundalini Yoga technique also known as breath of fire technique to release energies.
- Somatic Breathing: Focuses on exhaling slowly and consciously, allowing the body to release tension.
Aftercare and Integration: Processing Emotional Releases
Immediate aftercare of breathing exercises for emotional release involves prioritizing rest, avoiding strenuous activities, hydrating yourself well, using grounding techniques and journaling to reflect on your thoughts and emotions to process them. Additionally, some integration techniques you can employ are mindfulness practices like meditation and yoga, creative expression through art, dance or craft and talking to a therapist to accelerate emotional release.
Conclusion: Incorporating Breathwork into Your Emotional Wellness Journey
Practicing breathwork has many benefits, including lowered anxiety and stress, increased self-awareness, physical and emotional healing, improved emotional regulation and removal of emotional blockages. Breathwork is one of the most powerful tools to unblock any stuck emotions because it relaxes the nervous system and activates your body’s natural tremor response. Some breathing techniques you can use are Holotropic breathing, Pranayama, Somatic breathing and Box breathing. Learn more about breathwork from experts on SoulSensei.
Sources
Healthline – 10 breathing exercises to try when you’re feeling stressed. By Emily Cronkleton.
