One of the neat things about being human is that we are all connected on a variety of levels. What you breathe out, I breathe in. When we have an experience together, we can walk away with a bond and memories for a lifetime. People can “put their heads together” and come up with something great. We can hug, and when we do, our hearts sync up and our nervous systems calm down. Or we can fight, and work each other up into a lather over something probably trivial. Folks can often “sense” a bad person or place. We can have a gut feeling about something and it can often be correct… particularly when we know better how to drive this glorious vehicle our souls call home.
Your Breath Is The Bridge
If left unchecked, for the most part, our state of mind informs the quality of our breath.
So if you’re watching a movie and a scary part comes up, and your body flinches and jumps, you probably don’t notice in the moment but your breath does a little dance number of its own, becoming very shallow. It does this because your body perceives danger at that moment, and a fantastic way to get your attention focused on removing the danger is to literally take your breath away. Fast, shallow breath puts your body in fight or flight mode and tells it to mobilize only the most necessary resources. It’s not an optimal state to be in, yet many people are like this all the time: tense muscles, shallow breathing, and a high-strung kind of vibe.
But when you know a little about how it works, you can use your breath to tell your body what to do instead. You can do everything in your power to remain chill and put yourself in control over the vibe you’re putting out there. This will not only draw the right people to you, but more importantly, it will keep the wrong people away. And, it will have the added benefit of keeping you and your inner world more peaceful. These are the roots of Polyvagal Theory, the idea that we can tune into the breath and the sensations in our body to help steer us in the right direction in life, toward things that, quite literally, resonate with us.
What is The Polyvagal Theory?
Polyvagal Theory suggests that our nervous system plays a huge role in our health and well-being as we move through the world, and the vagus nerve (cranial nerve 10), is what most of this theory centers on. The vagus nerve is the longest nerve in the human body, touching most areas throughout. Importantly, it also acts as a two-way street taking information from outside the nervous system to the inside, and vice-versa. The vagus nerve is what you’re speaking to when you manipulate your breath to calm your nervous system. And because it runs throughout the entirety of your body, giving and receiving information, it can hurt or heal based on what it’s reacting to.
Here is a blog I wrote a few years ago that talks about some of this and also gives you a couple of breathing exercises to try.
Serious Self-Love
Tuning into your nervous system and giving it what it needs (more breath, quiet time), is a great act of self-love. When you’re more cool, calm, and collected, it’s not just great for you, inside your own body. Other people feel safe and calm around you too, and that’s a wonderful feeling, to be a safe place for someone.
What’s also great is you start to realize that when you “just don’t get a good feeling” from a person, that’s your nervous system telling you something. You don’t need to know what it’s saying exactly… maybe the person is just having a bad day… but the point is that you’ve got that two-way communication flowing with your nervous system, and you can make choices based on this additional data. It’s another simple way to continually put yourself in the best possible position to make good decisions and to live life on easy mode as often as you can.
When we learn how to tune in to cues from our body and nervous system, we can use the information to inform how we move through life and to whom we give our time and energy. By paying attention to how people, places, and situations make us feel, we can develop a deeper relationship with not only ourselves but the people who matter the most to us on a fundamental level, a deep vibrational level. And that strength radiates from you.
So when you heal yourself, you really do heal the world, whether you’re trying to or not.
Peace and love to you, wherever this message finds you.
