1/24 Whole Life Wednesday

Kim and Sarah looking strong!
We're in our first week of the New Year Whole Life Challenge. The Whole Life Challenge (WLC) is more than a nutrition challenge. The WLC aims to improve our habits in nutrition, hydration, exercise, mobility, sleep, introspection, and a weekly rotating habit. This week's healthy lifestyle habit is mindful breathing. The instructions are simple: 

1. Sit quietly or lie down, close your eyes and mouth, and put one hand on your chest and the other on your stomach.
2. Breath only through your nose while focusing your attention on keeping your chest still while your abdomen rises and falls with each breath, breathing the minimal amount necessary.
3. Feel the rising and falling of your abdomen, noticing any thoughts, physical sensations, or emotions that arise in your mind.
4. Let your thoughts, sensations, and emotions pass by, using your breathing as an anchor to focus on.
5. Do this for a minimum of ten minutes each day. You can break it into multiple pieces, doing a few minutes in the morning, a few in the afternoon, etc., but you should total at least ten minutes overall.

The WLC folks think this healthy lifestyle practice is important because:

"Can you recall a time when something got you really scared or upset? One of the things you may recall from that moment is that the quality of your breath changed. To recover your calm, you may have told yourself (or had someone tell you), “Just breathe.” Breathing down into your belly, moving past your chest, may have restored both your physical and your mental state.

The quality of our breathing can have both positive and negative impacts on our life in powerful ways. As a result of the stresses in our modern world, many of us tend to have shallow, chest-centered breaths, a pattern typically associated in research and in our own personal experience with fear, anger, and other negative emotions.

Believe it or not, that current runs both ways — emotions can cause breathing patterns and breathing patterns can cause particular emotions to manifest. Focusing your attention on establishing calm, belly-centered breathing gives you the ability to instill a pattern that can literally move fear and sadness out, as well as elicit joy.

But you don’t have to wait until you’re upset to practice this breathing. Spending a few minutes bringing your breath down to your belly can increase your normal level of calm and awareness any time you like. And, yes, it can also do wonders when you are upset to change your breathing before you speak or respond to the others involved.

Taking a greater degree of control and establishing awareness in how you breathe is a practical, potent tool in creating deep physical and emotional well-being."

Breathing is, of course, natural and for the most part automatic. The cool thing is that we can control our breathing to control our anxiety, stress and arousal. The folks at WLC are not the only ones who value breath control. SealFit encourages a box breathing practice. Power, Speed and Endurance offers classes and workshops on the Art of Breath. 
I encourage all of you, even those of you not doing the WLC, to spend some time this week focusing on your breathing. Good luck! 

Click Here for The WOD