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Breathwork to Calm Your Nervous System | A Simple Practice for Homeostasis · Calm By Lane

• 0:01
  Lane Kennedy: Welcome.
• 0:02
  Lane Kennedy: Welcome to Calm by Lane, Meditation for Life.
• 0:04
  Lane Kennedy: I'm Lane Kennedy.
• 0:05
  Lane Kennedy: Thanks for being with me.
• 0:07
  Lane Kennedy: Today, I wanna give you something practical.
• 0:09
  Lane Kennedy: You know, we've talked, a lot about my nervous system and the collapse and what's happened, and today I wanna share something a little more practical, simple, something that is useful, and the thing that has constantly helped me.
• 0:23
  Lane Kennedy: Before I get into the practice, I do want to remind you that this is a free show supported by the Calm by Lane Practice Library, which is my private, completely ad-free audio library of longer, juicier meditations, somatic practices,
• 0:39
  Lane Kennedy: sleep practices, all the, all the things.
• 0:42
  Lane Kennedy: It's a membership, and you can find out all that information over at lanekennedy.com/practicewithme.
• 0:49
  Lane Kennedy: It's a great way to support the show and to make sure that I can continue to do this for you and others.
• 0:55
  Lane Kennedy: So let's begin with breath.
• 1:00
  Lane Kennedy: So there was something happening to me during the worst part of my autonomic collapse that I don't think I really understood at first.
• 1:09
  Lane Kennedy: I would wake up in the middle of the night and realize that I was breathing incredibly fast.
• 1:13
  Lane Kennedy: I still do this sometimes in the morning where I'm just...
• 1:17
  Lane Kennedy: It, it's like a three-three breath.
• 1:19
  Lane Kennedy: When we are breathing, we always wanna drop into a three-six breath to get into that parasympathetic state.
• 1:24
  Lane Kennedy: So a three-three breath is more of a box breath, a more alert state.
• 1:29
  Lane Kennedy: And if you've ever awakened like that, you know exactly that the mind is already going, right?
• 1:34
  Lane Kennedy: Like, I'm like, "Oh, why am I breathing like this?
• 1:36
  Lane Kennedy: What's happening to me?
• 1:37
  Lane Kennedy: What's my heart doing?"
• 1:37
  Lane Kennedy: And it always comes back to, "Am I gonna be able to fall asleep?"
• 1:41
  Lane Kennedy: That's the worst question.
• 1:43
  Lane Kennedy: I started working with the breath.
• 1:44
  Lane Kennedy: And it wasn't a complicated breathwork sequence.
• 1:47
  Lane Kennedy: It's not a, y- you know, Wim Hof heroic breath holds, Ben Holt.
• 1:52
  Lane Kennedy: None, none of that.
• 1:52
  Lane Kennedy: None of that.
• 1:53
  Lane Kennedy: I wanted a gentler breath, and maybe I would breathe in gently for a count of four and breathe out for the count of six, and sometimes I didn't count at all.
• 2:01
  Lane Kennedy: And I wouldn't just let the inhale arrive and then make the exhale slow and easy and unforced.
• 2:09
  Lane Kennedy: So this is really what matters here.
• 2:11
  Lane Kennedy: If you're taking an enormous breath because somebody told you deep breathing is relaxing, haaa, you can actually end up breathing more air than you need.
• 2:22
  Lane Kennedy: So I think I...
• 2:24
  Lane Kennedy: I just sent out an email to my listeners and my students about breathwork.
• 2:29
  Lane Kennedy: James Nestor, uh, he wrote that really great book, uh, Breathe.
• 2:33
  Lane Kennedy: He wrote it during the pandemic, and Oh my God, I highly suggest anybody picking that book up.
• 2:38
  Lane Kennedy: I go back to it all the time.
• 2:40
  Lane Kennedy: But we actually breathe in more air than we need.
• 2:43
  Lane Kennedy: We don't need that much air.
• 2:45
  Lane Kennedy: So, uh, bigger is not necessarily better.
• 2:49
  Lane Kennedy: And when I say deep breathing, what I really mean is comfortable diaphragmatic breathing that feels spacious and easy rather than gulping in giant breaths.
• 2:58
  Lane Kennedy: Gulping reminds me of my dog, Oh, this poor...
• 3:01
  Lane Kennedy: So if you don't know, I have an Irish wolfhound.
• 3:04
  Lane Kennedy: I have two Irish wolfhounds, Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, Magnus.
• 3:09
  Lane Kennedy: He's my boy dog, and he inhales his food and water.
• 3:12
  Lane Kennedy: It's like, like major.
• 3:14
  Lane Kennedy: And then he has gas, he, like, because he's gulping air as he's breathing, and so he's going through the day like burping, like blah, blah.
• 3:25
  Lane Kennedy: So I don't want you to think, you know, this diaphragmatic breathing is going to cause you to, uh, have weird burps But we want to make sure that we're paying attention.
• 3:35
  Lane Kennedy: That was a tangent.
• 3:36
  Lane Kennedy: I'm sorry.
• 3:36
  Lane Kennedy: We wanna make sure that we're paying attention to our exhale.
• 3:40
  Lane Kennedy: So breathing and your heart rate are, are really linked.
• 3:44
  Lane Kennedy: And again, normal breathing, the heart rate tends to increase somewhat during inhalation and decrease during that exhalation.
• 3:50
  Lane Kennedy: It's really called, a respiratory sinus ar- arrhythmia.
• 3:53
  Lane Kennedy: So slow breathing can influence autonomic cardiovascular regulation, and breathing patterns with a comfortable, somewhat longer exhale are often experienced as settling, right?
• 4:05
  Lane Kennedy: So we really wanna get this to slow down.
• 4:11
  Lane Kennedy: Okay?
• 4:12
  Lane Kennedy: So when you think about your breath, you want to breathe in and then breathe out nice and slow.
• 4:18
  Lane Kennedy: So again, three, six, four, eight.
• 4:21
  Lane Kennedy: That's where we wanna be dropping into the parasympathetic nervous system.
• 4:25
  Lane Kennedy: And this is where I want you to start thinking about homeostasis because your body is constantly regulating itself, right?
• 4:31
  Lane Kennedy: Think about this.
• 4:32
  Lane Kennedy: Your body has the temperature to regulate your blood pressure, the, your blood chemistry, the glucose, uh, all the fluids, the gases, the heart rate.
• 4:41
  Lane Kennedy: So there's countless of processes being adjusted all the time.
• 4:44
  Lane Kennedy: And so to keep this internal condition really kind of, you know, compatible, right, we have to find regulation, and the breath helps us stay in regulation.
• 4:55
  Lane Kennedy: So breathing is unusual because it belongs to both worlds.
• 4:59
  Lane Kennedy: Most of the time it happens automatically, but then you can also, consciously influence the way you breathe.
• 5:06
  Lane Kennedy: You can consciously slow things down, and that gives us, or it gives me, interesting doorway into the autonomic nervous system, right?
• 5:16
  Lane Kennedy: That's what I've been so focused on.
• 5:18
  Lane Kennedy: And so this, you know, my dysautonomia, breathing wasn't part of how I supported myself.
• 5:24
  Lane Kennedy: It wasn't a cure for what was happening to me, but I began to recognize that, what if I just slowed down?
• 5:32
  Lane Kennedy: And I would show up to class with my students and, and, you know, I wasn't I wasn't looking good And they'd be like, "Are you sure you wanna be here?"
• 5:39
  Lane Kennedy: And I'd be like, "Yes, I need to breathe."
• 5:42
  Lane Kennedy: Right?
• 5:42
  Lane Kennedy: So this breathing became my practice.
• 5:45
  Lane Kennedy: And as I was breathing, I would begin to feel everything start to slow down.
• 5:51
  Lane Kennedy: Like, I could begin to feel my feet.
• 5:52
  Lane Kennedy: I could feel my shoulders soften.
• 5:54
  Lane Kennedy: I could breathe more comfortably.
• 5:56
  Lane Kennedy: But again, it goes back to this longer, slower exhale Okay.
• 6:02
  Lane Kennedy: So why, why do I keep saying this again and again and again?
• 6:05
  Lane Kennedy: Because people don't know how to breathe And I'm guilty of this.
• 6:08
  Lane Kennedy: Like, I'm raising my hand here.
• 6:10
  Lane Kennedy: So we're gonna practice because we need to, we need to practice.
• 6:14
  Lane Kennedy: Repetition matters because the nervous system learns from experience, right?
• 6:17
  Lane Kennedy: So we have to do something, you know, 30 days, 60 days for the nervous system to say, "Oh, they're actually telling me the truth," right?
• 6:24
  Lane Kennedy: The brain and the body are constantly updating their expectations because they're, they're basing everything on the experience.
• 6:33
  Lane Kennedy: So if every time I notice, you know, something out of the ordinary and my, my system goes into alert, then I'm gonna have panic about it.
• 6:40
  Lane Kennedy: But if I notice something and I say, "Oh, it's okay," then my body...
• 6:44
  Lane Kennedy: And I do that every day, "Oh, it's okay."
• 6:47
  Lane Kennedy: My body's like, "Oh, it's okay," right?
• 6:49
  Lane Kennedy: I want to remind myself, remind my body that I am safe, and this is where the breath is critically important, right?
• 6:58
  Lane Kennedy: The breath, when it's nice and calm, that tells the body, "Oh, nothing is chasing me.
• 7:05
  Lane Kennedy: I can fi- I can let go of this long exhale.
• 7:09
  Lane Kennedy: Oh, yeah, it's okay.
• 7:11
  Lane Kennedy: I can breathe.
• 7:12
  Lane Kennedy: I can drop into that yummy state."
• 7:14
  Lane Kennedy: See, this is what I didn't understand.
• 7:15
  Lane Kennedy: This is what I'm, why I'm trying to make a point here, is that the breath, the body and the breath are in relationship.
• 7:23
  Lane Kennedy: The body's, like, waiting.
• 7:24
  Lane Kennedy: Are you going to exhale nice and long so I can relax, or are you gonna hold it in and be stressed out?
• 7:29
  Lane Kennedy: D- Am I making sense here?
• 7:31
  Lane Kennedy: So, you know, i- in the middle of the night, I have a lot of my students are, like, insomniacs.
• 7:36
  Lane Kennedy: They're just awake, including me.
• 7:39
  Lane Kennedy: Like, sometimes I'll have these moments of, like, I'm just awake, and the breath is the tool that can put you back to sleep, So again, breathing in for four and out for six, and then again.
• 7:51
  Lane Kennedy: Four and six somehow are, like, magical numbers, and if you can do four and eight, that's great, too.
• 7:57
  Lane Kennedy: But six tends to be a, more comfortable for me and for my students.
• 8:01
  Lane Kennedy: So I just, I want you to really start thinking about this, you know, at 2:00 in the morning or 3:00 in the afternoon Taking that nice inhale and the longer exhale so your body and nervous system can sync
• 8:18
  Lane Kennedy: up because again, your nervous system is listening.
• 8:22
  Lane Kennedy: Okay, so I think I'm gonna get into the practice now because I've talked enough about this, right?
• 8:27
  Lane Kennedy: You can, you can get into that, right?
• 8:30
  Lane Kennedy: So let's...
• 8:31
  Lane Kennedy: I just wanna do a couple of rounds here or practice with you.
• 8:33
  Lane Kennedy: Take a large breath here.
• 8:35
  Lane Kennedy: Inhale for one, two, three, four.
• 8:43
  Lane Kennedy: Slow breathing, exhale, one, two, three, four, five.
• 8:52
  Lane Kennedy: Wait.
• 8:53
  Lane Kennedy: Inhale, one, two, three, four.
• 9:01
  Lane Kennedy: Wait.
• 9:03
  Lane Kennedy: Exhale, two, three, four, five, six.
• 9:14
  Lane Kennedy: Wait.
• 9:16
  Lane Kennedy: Inhale, one, two, three, four.
• 9:24
  Lane Kennedy: Wait.
• 9:27
  Lane Kennedy: Exhale, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
• 9:40
  Lane Kennedy: Wait.
• 9:42
  Lane Kennedy: Inhale, one, two, three, four.
• 9:52
  Lane Kennedy: Wait.
• 9:55
  Lane Kennedy: Exhale.
• 9:57
  Lane Kennedy: One, two, three, four, five, six.
• 10:08
  Lane Kennedy: Very good.
• 10:11
  Lane Kennedy: All right I just wanted you to get a feel for that.
• 10:18
  Lane Kennedy: It can be difficult.
• 10:19
  Lane Kennedy: you know, we're so used to having these short, shallow breaths.
• 10:24
  Lane Kennedy: So just doing a couple rounds like that can be challenging, okay?
• 10:28
  Lane Kennedy: So don't, don't be like, "Oh my God, she's counting too fast," or, "She's counting too slow."
• 10:32
  Lane Kennedy: Just, just practice, right?
• 10:33
  Lane Kennedy: We're just practicing together here.
• 10:35
  Lane Kennedy: No big deal.
• 10:36
  Lane Kennedy: No big deal.
• 10:39
  Lane Kennedy: So that's what I have for you today.
• 10:40
  Lane Kennedy: Just remember your breath, and remember that your, your nervous system is listening, your immune system is listening, and your breath is so critical in all of this and your wellbeing, thanks for hanging out with me.
• 10:54
  Lane Kennedy: If you wanna support the show, head on over to the Calm by Lane Practice Library at lanekennedy.com/practicewithme.
• 11:04
  Lane Kennedy: Just for today, remember that your body is always adjusting, always responding, always working towards balance, and you don't need to consciously control every part of that process.
• 11:16
  Lane Kennedy: Sometimes you can just simply give yourself a little space.
• 11:20
  Lane Kennedy: Just do a comfortable inhale, just like a you know?
• 11:25
  Lane Kennedy: That's enough.
• 11:26
  Lane Kennedy: Okay, friend, I'll catch up with you next time.
• 11:29
  Lane Kennedy: Keep noticing what's happening with your breath.
• 11:32
  Lane Kennedy: I'm with you all the way.
• 11:35
  Lane Kennedy: Take good care.