Understanding Anxiety and How Breathwork Can Help

Anxiety, at its core, is a program just like software programs I.E. Microsoft Word. It’s simple enough that whoever programmed Word wanted you to be able to write and store your ideas. At birth, we are programmed with an innate desire to fulfill our life’s purpose. What happens after birth through experiences, family and societal conditioning creates a new program telling you how to interpret the experiences of your life. We call these programs “beliefs”.

Programming happens so early in life that you are unaware that there is an invisible interpreting-layer over what is happening. The purpose being to protect you from  accessing or removing the program.

Now, you may wonder how having these programs could be useful to us. Well, if you were unloved as a child and now you have a belief that you are not worthy to be loved, the program is actually designed so you will avoid pain in the future. When someone doesn’t love you, now you have a reason. Your program starts looking around to see who values you and who doesn’t. I know this sounds completely ridiculous and like it shouldn’t work this way, but that’s what is so strange and mysterious about us humans; we do a lot of things that don’t work even when we can see they don’t. 

How much time did you waste on your phone yesterday? How many times have you made choices that weren’t in your best interest?

My point is this: programs are designed to make sense of your unprocessed experience. They don’t work most of the time; we don’t see the invisible layer through which we are perceiving our life, yet the invisible layer is constantly creating a false assessment over what is really happening. Anxiety is one of those programs. 

Clearing anxiety means we have to bring it up to our conscious mind and make a new choice. You want to change your programming so you can make healthy choices and be successful with your endeavors. This is where breathwork can be a useful tool.

For people with high levels of anxiety it can make it hard to even leave the house. For the majority of us there is always something that we feel anxious about. Having enough money, dealing with conflict, controlling our addictive tendencies, pleasing someone who is expecting something from you, being a good parent, being a good child. The list is as endless as there are experiences. What might be easy for one person might be hard for another.

When I was growing up I could sense and feel all the repressed emotion in the environment. I knew as early as five without having the understanding or words that adults felt one way and spoke another. This made me feel unsafe. Since the conditioning in my family was to keep the real feelings down, that’s what I did. As I got older when I wanted to succeed at something I was constantly anxious about what people would think and would hide the very thing that I wanted approval for. People then saw me as a fraud…And I was.