Breathing Group Classes
Breathing Assessment & Treatment Group Classes for Physiotherapy Clients at Move Authentically Physiotherapy
with Christine Campbell, MScPT
4 Monday evenings, 6:30pm to 8pm, upstairs at KIHC
Tag: stress
Chronic Symptoms? Let’s Fix Your Breathing
In many ways, your breathing pattern reflects your health status and health resiliency. It’s a gateway to your nervous system, cardiovascular system, and your body’s biological homeostatic mechanisms (how the body maintains balance). A Breathing Pattern Disorder can be subtle but extremely impactful: They show up in a variety of seemingly disparate symptoms and undermine many people’s attempts to heal chronic illness. Addressing Breathing Pattern Disorders is one very important way we can strengthen your entire body and help you heal.
Symptoms of a Breathing Pattern Disorder
People with a Breathing Pattern Disorder often experience a few of these symptoms:
Just breathe!
“Just breathe!” This is often much easier said than done! There is a great deal that goes into healthy breathing, especially given the stressors of the twenty-first century. Breathing is foundational to our health and yet many of us are not breathing well.
Your Health Hinges on your Nervous System
These days it seems everyone has elevated stress levels. Most of us don’t realize just how much that affects our health and wellbeing. Our nervous system acts as an information superhighway, delivering messages throughout our body regarding stress management. From a Shamanic Healing perspective, this is how and why it matters:
What are You Willing to Suffer For?
The answer to this question can help you stick to the most difficult healing work: Exercise, dietary regimes, reframing your thoughts and perspectives about life, healing a chronic illness, spiritual growth. In other words, what is so meaningful to you that through pain or discomfort, you’d still want to do the work? This is what you’ll use to find the strength to continue choosing the healing work each day.*
This is also part of the archetypal hero’s journey: The classic human experience of traversing challenges toward satisfying and deep transformation.
Overcoming Stress… and our excuses not to exercise
This time, I’m writing this article just as much for myself as for the wonderful people who explore our website for health inspiration and insight! It’s been a stressful year for many, and with a fourth wave and fall weather on the horizon, few of us can spare the lapse in our health that occurs from not exercising.
Even if you’re unsure of the details, many of you know that exercise reduces our risk of serious infection by addressing co-morbidities (health conditions like diabetes and heart disease that make us more susceptible to complications from illness). For example, a balanced exercise routine improves how our body uses oxygen (i.e. “cardiorespiratory fitness”), balances blood sugar, and balances the immune system. Stress can also be a risk factor for illness, and exercise is a HUGE stress-relieving activity for many people. But it’s a bit of a catch-22 if stress also inhibits your ability or willingness to exercise.
What is Mindfulness?
A technique? A technology? A lifestyle choice? A therapy? Arguably all these things – so no wonder many people are confused about what it is and whether it’s worth pursuing. But people are pursuing it. We find mindfulness at universities, elementary schools, hospitals, and government institutions.
A contemporary definition of mindfulness describes it as a technique, not affiliated with religion (i.e. secular), used to reduce “negative experiences”, such as those related to stress, pain, depression, anxiety, or chronic illness. It’s described as a method to cultivate our focus on the present moment – and after days of scheduling, planning ahead, trying to recall details of the past, how could this not be a welcome relief?! Contemporary mindfulness is also about meeting our experience in the present with openness, curiosity, and kindness.
Introduction to Mindfulness Course
What is mindfulness? What is it not? How does it alleviate stress and why might you want to give it a try?
Please join Lisa Sabatini for this 3-part online (Zoom) introductory mini mindfulness course:
Wednesday evenings 7:00 to 8:00pm
September 15th to 29th, 2021
Address Stress by Changing your Internal Physiology
True or False: In healthy people, the heart rate should be stable and consistent, like a metronome.
True or False: In healthy people, the heart rate should be stable and consistent, like a metronome.
This couldn’t be further from the truth, actually. High variability between heart beats (known as Heart Rate Variability, or HRV), in which the heart rate speeds up and slows down in each breath, is a wonderful marker of good physical health and emotional resiliency.
A Visualization to Prevent Your Next Downward Spiral
In my field of work, I see several clients struggling with chronic stress and anxiety. These individuals often find themselves pulled into habitual and problematic thinking patterns, which usually include (in cognitive behavioural therapy terms) catastrophic thinking, worrying and over-planning, should-ing, rumination, black and white thinking, and mind reading. Because thinking in this way has become quite automatic to the stressed or anxious individual, it can happen outside of their conscious awareness. Before realizing it,
