Meditation and Breathing for Health

More and more doctors are recommending meditation and breathing for health and wellbeing and it certainly deserves your contemplation and consideration. Research has scientifically proven that practicing meditation and breathing for health improvement is a safe and simple way to balance your physical fitness, emotional wellbeing, and mental state and its countless values have been known and practiced for thousands of years. Listed below are just a few of the benefits sports professionals, celebrities and people all over the world are endorsing after practicing meditation and  breathing for health and fitness.

• Enhances energy, strength, vigour and fitness.
• Helps keep blood pressure normal.
• Amazing stress buster.
• Creates a state of deep relaxation and general feeling of wellbeing.
• Helps with P.M.T.
• Increases concentration and strengthens the mind.
• Helps reduce heart disease
• Helps with weight loss.
•  Builds self confidence.
• Reduces anxiety attacks as it lowers the levels of blood lactate.
• Increases serotonin which influences moods and behaviour. (low levels of serotonin are associated with depression, headaches, obesity and insomnia.)
• Helps weight loss
• Helps cure addictions

If you regularly practice meditation and breathing for health and fitness you will begin to feel so much calmer and in control. You’ll feel far more relaxed and happy. You won’t become stressed about things and you’ll feel more peaceful and calm about everything. You’ll go with the flow and things that used to irritate you before will simply become insignificant. 

The following breathing exercise boosts the immune system and helps you to relax:-
This simple yet powerful exercise stimulates and cleanses the body’s lymphatic glands. According to Tony Robbins, the top lymphatic doctors in the world have not found anything to increase the immune system better than flooding oxygen through the body with deep diaphragmatic breathing.
 Breathing in through your mouth expands your chest, yet when you inhale through your nose your abdomen extends causing the diaphragm to pull air to the bottom of your lungs which carries a healthy dose of oxygen into your bloodstream and brain which will also help you to become relaxed. Anthony Robbins teaches inhaling on a ratio of 1 holding for 4 and exhaling for 2. The ratio is the guide.
 
So if you slowly inhale for example to the count of 4
hold your breath for the count of 16
then exhale very slowly through your mouth to the count of 8.
Repeat this exercise 10 times.
Simply find a number that you are comfortable with and build the ratio gradually.
If you do this exercise three times a day you and your immune system will benefit immensely.

By Marilyn Barker-Smith