A Five-Part Series. Part 2: Breathing
If you’re new to this group, maybe you haven’t noticed how often I share the wonders of Internal Family Systems (IFS), the brilliant methodology for healing wounds – and most importantly, discovering and loving who you are.So a great start on that would be to refer to the LinkTree list that you received in the Welcome message in Messenger from me.
Or you can go to the Guides section of this page and scroll a bit to find my LinkTree list created just for you. There, you’ll get a number of posts and Live replays on a variety of topics, including IFS.So the question you could easily raise is: “If IFS is so great, why, DrDeb, do you include five other tools in the teaching that you do here in our group and in your work with private clients?”
The short answer is that I’m making IFS better.
You will see that when I show you how each of these tools integrates seamlessly into the deep IFS work that our team does. – And how you can start to apply it yourself right now.Last post, I explained that Affirmations, the first of the tools I wanted to share with you, is actually a statement from your higher, wiser Self to the you that may fall down in spirit once in a while.
To understand that more deeply, please do check out the Part 1 post put up on October 3, 2022 (in which I also share what drove me to create this whole thing).With that introduction, let’s move on to the second amazing tool:
Breathing Some of our greatest gifts are free and breathing is one of them.
Did you know, for example, that when a person breathes deeply and exhales more slowly than they inhale, it stimulates the vagal nerve which sends calming hormones into the bloodstream?Our bodies have more than 20 types of those calming hormones, called endorphins, and deep, slow breathing brings them out.
According to the Cleveland Clinic, “They are ‘feel-good’ chemicals because they can make you feel better and put you in a positive state of mind.”Get this: the beta-endorphin has “a stronger effect than morphine on your body.”
Whoa! That’s just from breathing, DrDeb??
What this means is that you don’t have to do anything to make this happen. Just breathe.That is incredibly important because it requires no mental effort.
Just breathe.
Your body will do the rest.
Automatically.
This is one of those tools that is called “bottom up.” Bottom up tools come from the parts of our brains that are on automatic such as breathing.à We don’t have to think any special thoughts or force ourselves to feel what we don’t really feel and don’t want to feel.
Imagine being upset. You’ve just had some kind of difference with your spouse and you want to fight but you know that will make things worse. You have to grit your teeth to keep from saying what’s really on your mind.Now, imagine, instead of gritting your teeth, you go to another room for privacy (the bathroom?) and you just breathe, gently and slowly, nice big inhales and slow, steady exhales.
You tell your thoughts that you’re not in the mood for them right now and you pay attention to your breath. Your mind wanders off to some comfortable place. Breathing.And you exit that private space no longer triggered.
The upset feelings? –
Gone.
The desire to retaliate and “show them”? – Gone.How and Why Did That Happen?
Amongst the many free gifts that humans have embedded within them is the ability to change moods, reduce stress, and become positive without trying. Just through breathing.It is called a Bottom Up process because it originates in the lower regions of the brain that have nothing to do with thinking.
Here’s an example that most likely has happened to you dozens of times: You’re in a not-so-great mood when you go into a movie theater. The movie is very funny and there are some scenes that just crack you up thinking about them later.You exit the theater in a completely changed mood.
See, our moods are not engraved in stone much as we often feel stuck in some bad place.There actually are different things we can do to change those moods – and keep them changed – without any mental effort whatsoever. And breathing is one of them.
How This Integrates With Learning IFS
One of the biggest problems of the modern mind is that it is waaaaay too full of thoughts: random thoughts, rambling thoughts, obsessive thoughts, disturbing thoughts, to-do lists, and the same old thoughts.Over and over.
I wondered how many thoughts people have in a day. One Google response was 6,000 and another was 60,000.Even plain old 6K is a lot of thoughts!
And the presence of thoughts, in and of itself, can keep us from feeling relaxed and happy. Combine that with the stresses that get to us and it is almost impossible to function.But breathing – and just noticing that you are breathing! – is a way to completely de-stress.
This is of enormous value when you haven’t yet gotten to the part of the program that helps two people communicate in Self energy.
Even though no one would have necessarily learned how to unblend from dominating parts that want to take over Self energy, the very act of clearing the head through breathing and noticing it brings about the clear head and calm that is needed.There is another tie-in to IFS as well: Later on, as we get into IFS, we will start having conversations with our parts.
We will also rescue our innocent hidden children from painful memories.All this takes a bit of imagination and calm. And those two things come with focus on the breath because they create a clear head and they physiologically de-stress us.
Breathing is so important and valuable that it is introduced in the second week of the program. AND [wink, wink] I created a method to help people who just can’t seem to clear their head of thoughts. So are you going to start the breathing practice? LMK how it works for you.