How to Use Breathwork for Stress and Anxiety
- Elijah Nisenboim
Before we talk about how to use breathwork for stress and anxiety, lets start at the beginning. Stress and anxiety is a function of our modern life but what is stress and how does it become an active agent in our life?
Let me simplify by suggesting that stress is really resistance. Resistance to the acceptance of what is happening in your life.
Read that again; stress is resistance to the acceptance of what is happening in your life.
Without acceptance, we are at war with what is and in essence, we are at war with ourselves. Stress is the name we give to the feeling of resistance.
How do we come to being in resistance? Your mind tells you to.
Your mind has programming that acts an awful lot like software in a computer. The programs were created and designed directly from your earliest childhood experiences; the difficult experiences buried deep within you that lay unresolved. The programs’ purpose is simple: protect you from the possibility of a re-occurrence of the pain of the past.
Your mind is constantly observing and on the alert for any threats that are similar to the pain of the past. If only our threat assessment was accurate then we would be well protected! Unfortunately, the mind cannot accurately interpret what is happening because it is looking through a filter that is already seeing a threat.
You see, the mind doesn’t know reality from fiction. Think about going to the movies; you can cry at an emotional or painful scene even though it’s not real. You use your five senses to observe and interpret, but you’re rarely accurate because of the pain of the past. Because you are trying to avoid pain you will automatically be in resistance to the unpleasant or challenging circumstances that happen in your life. Sad but true.
This results in a lot of tension in the body and mind. As I said before, you are at war with yourself, trying to keep yourself safe, but you’re actually it doing the opposite; creating tension which creates new problems.
So how do we change this? Since there are real facts of life; like how much money we have versus how much we owe, or having to deal with an irritating co-worker, or not having enough time to get all the house chores completed before your in-laws come over. Our power can’t be to simply try to change the outside world. While having more money, a different job or more time might help, the circumstances of our life and our state of mind will play a huge part in how we see it and what choices we make.
All of us are affected by family and societal conditioning and traumas; big and small. When we can’t process these experiences we compartmentalize, bury, avoid, and eventually forget. By the time we are two years old our wiring is done and we do not feel whole. We are incomplete; both looking for and avoiding that buried part. While we spend our life seeking peace and oneness with ourselves, life, and others, we don’t want to touch the missing part because it’s associated with pain and suffering and we’ve turned it into the monster under the bed.
We have to work with our attitude toward how we feel about things, and to do that you need to be aware of the tension and resistance you are living in.
To heal is to get back the missing part, but how? There are many modalities, teachers, and practices that have value. It takes a village + time to help us to heal. But when you become serious. So serious that your healing is your number-one priority, then Breathwork is something you should investigate.
Our breath is the perfect representation of the duality of life. The in-breath and the out-breath represent birth and death, in and out, conscious and unconscious. It is profound how much it represents the two worlds we inhabit here on earth. More importantly like life, itself, it will happen automatically whether you think about it or not. Yet, if you do think about it you can guide your life to fulfill your destiny and be whole. Forget about your breath and you are an animal, automatic and unconscious. Think about your breath and you gain access to the very thing that has given you life the moment you came out of your mother’s womb. How profound! And every moment it is with you, willing to be trained. This is how breathwork heals.
Breathwork is a bridge between your two worlds. It is the bridge between life which you take in on the inhale and death which you release on the exhale. It bridges your inner unseen world and your outer world that you perceive through your five senses. It is a bridge between the conscious world you know about and all the forgotten memories of the past buried in your unconscious.
EFFIJI BREATHWORK FOR STRESS AND ANXIETY
Effiji Breath begins not by training your mind but by getting to the root of your suffering and clearing it out so there is no more tension due to the past. It’s an opportunity to come in contact with the source of your anxiety and stress, the source of what makes you go into tension in the first place.
Finding the source is like getting down into the root of a weed and digging it out from there. It’s more powerful and more complete. Training is important, too, to help your overall feeling of well-being but if the root is rotten, you can do all the training you want, but the tension will remain. The tension comes from beneath where you are working.
If you have a good daily practice and it’s not transforming you, it’s likely that you aren’t getting deep enough. The protective programming requires an outside person to steer you toward the root of the problem.
Effiji Breath practice with a trained facilitator can do this. Again to reiterate, Effiji Breath is not about training the mind and body, it is about rooting out and becoming free of trauma and conditioning so the natural intelligence that is inherent to all beings is easy to access at any moment.
When you breathe in/when you inhale you are connecting to the inner world and slowly moving toward the unconscious world where the roots of stress lie. The style of Effiji Breath though, is not a toy you should just start playing with on your own. You are dealing with hidden things that have been protected for a reason. The releasing of old protected patterns, or traumas, or unhealthy addictions, etc. can be a very intense experience. Seek a guide who can walk with you and be objective while this clearing out is happening.
When we do Effiji Breath you will gain access to these places of deeply held tension that are the cause of stress and anxiety and the habit of living in the negative mind.
Remember that in order to protect you from further pain, the body and mind have organized to resist, avoid, bury and forget about the experience. We need to get that energy moving again in your life. When that energy is moving you will have flow, flexibility, hope and most importantly you will see choice. You will replace stress, anxiety, and worry with positivity.
When you get to the point where you are no longer willing to simply live with stress and anxiety, you are ready for bigger change, this is a great time to try Effiji Breathwork for stress and anxiety.
When you are ready for the bigger change that comes from clearing out the core blocks inside, Effiji Breathwork is a perfect practice to do because it’s very direct and very straightforward. You only have one job; to breathe. The facilitator’s job is to support you and give you safe passage to your destination; freedom and peace.
You let the breathwork take care of the stress and anxiety, and let the facilitator manage the safety of the journey.
Even just one time, one session of practicing can be life changing for a person who lives in stress and anxiety. You’ll feel a monumental change after the session is over and start to understand the difference between the soul and the mind.
Finding the source is like getting down into the root of a weed and digging it out from there. It’s more powerful and more complete. Training is important, too, to help your overall feeling of well-being but if the root is rotten, you can do all the training you want, but the tension will remain. The tension comes from beneath where you are working.
Elijah Nisenboim
Elijah has been working with people on their path of personal consciousness work for more than 30 years. His program combines a lifetime of study and practice with many masters in breathwork, healing, music, Sufism, and Tai Chi. He has a unique method for guiding people to support their exponential evolution using Effiji breathwork, energetic movement and spiritual practice. As the founder of Effiji, he travels extensively offering deep immersion and training in his method. He currently has eleven volumes of music created specifically for Effiji Breath which can be found on all streaming services. He is also the author of What’s In Your Roots; Making the Unconscious Conscious. He resides in Northern California. READ THE FULL STORY HERE
Elijah Nisenboim
Elijah has been working with people on their path of personal consciousness work for more than 30 years. His program combines a lifetime of study and practice with many masters in breathwork, healing, music, Sufism, and Tai Chi. He has a unique method for guiding people to support their exponential evolution using Effiji breathwork, energetic movement and spiritual practice. As the founder of Effiji, he travels extensively offering deep immersion and training in his method. He currently has eleven volumes of music created specifically for Effiji Breath which can be found on all streaming services. He is also the author of What’s In Your Roots; Making the Unconscious Conscious. He resides in Northern California. READ THE FULL STORY HERE
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