6.30pm – 8pm, £40

To book your place, please visit our Acuity booking system.

“… Breath has patterns. Schemes create behaviour. Breath is a behaviour. Behaviour represents the person. Breath reveals the person” Bordoni et al (2018)

It was 2002 when Pierre Phillpott published a paper that turned an overlooked arrogance on its head. Namely, that for the last hundred years people had discounted the part the breath plays in our emotional regulation, our lives, our ability to control our nervous system and how it reacts. His finding that the Breath and Emotion are Bi-Directional and that specific emotions induce specific breath patterns allowed us all the freedom to make voluntary changes in breath patterns to induce specific emotions.

Since then the research has kept coming. At Stanford in 2017, Professor of Biochemistry, Mark Krasnow (the man who discovered Why We Sigh!) unveiled exactly how slow breathing regulates our emotions and induces tranquility. Every breath you take is being listened to a tiny section of emotional regulating neurons in the brainstem (about 170 of them) which then accordingly is telling the rest of the brain how to feel and what to do. It’s like you have a direct line to the 170 most important people in the world and unknowingly they’re listening to every breath and doing exactly as you instruct. Without you knowing!

So, demonstrably, by researcher after researcher, paper after paper, again and again, the breath is telling you what to do and feel, and you do. And feel.

You know this yourself instinctively. How does an anxious person breathe? What about someone who’s depressed? An angry person? A person experiencing pain? Joy, Sadness, Fear, and Fury,? How about asthma, allergies, breathlessness and sleeplessness? All of these breath signatures literally create feeling. The good news is they are controllable and reversible, instantly. By using the natural mechanisms of the nervous system we can bring it to a state of calm almost instantly. We can stop the panic. We can halt the anger. We can reverse the fatigue.

This isn’t new. Books were written in ancient China and India about this more than 3000 years ago. The Brilliant Author and Science Journalist James Nestor who has single-handedly done more for breath awareness and popularisation than any other single person for a thousand years said that famously an old Taoist text from sometime around 1000BCE that to breathe in the wrong way has terrible adverse effects on health.

As James says in his new book “Breath – A Lost Art of A Science”, you can never be really healthy without breathing right, we know that now. And no more does this apply that to our emotions, our reactions, and how to run and regulate the nervous system so it works for you as a friend rather than against you as a jailor.

Learn how to regain control of your emotions, your feelings, your thoughts, and your behaviour by the revelation that is voluntarily regulated breathing patterns. It’s like getting a remote for the brain and the body, in your own hands.

References:

1) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6070065/

2) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232965660_Respiratory_feedback_in_the_generation_of_emotion

3) https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2017/03/study-discovers-how-slow-breathing-induces-tranquility.html#:~:text=Mark%20Krasnow%20and%20his%20colleagues,Breathe%20slowly%20and%20smoothly.

4) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232965660_Respiratory_feedback_in_the_generation_of_emotion

Read more about Ben Wolff (the host of the workshop) here on his profile page.

To book your place, please visit our Acuity booking system.

For anyone unable to afford the regular fee, please email us at events@thetherapeuticrooms.co.uk. We appreciate that some people may be adversely affected by this crisis, and will make ten spaces available at a concessionary rate of £10.

Weekly group on Friday mornings from 8am – 9am.

(Currently on hold)

This is a practical session in which we will experience the flavour of mindfulness in a safe group setting, cultivating a sense of stability, calm and stillness. The class will be centred around guided meditation, mindfulness techniques and compassionate enquiry. Mindfulness practice has been shown to alleviate stress and anxiety, reduce chronic pain, prevent relapse of depression, and increase our sense of happiness and well-being.

By cultivating awareness of our moment-to-moment experience, we begin to notice how much we spend our lives worrying about the past that has gone, and the future that has not yet arrived. We can therefore be more present to ourselves and to others, including those we live and work with.

Being present in the ‘here and now’ is a refreshing and restorative experience that can enable us to take better care of ourselves and others. Whether you are completely new to mindfulness or have attended a course and want to keep up your practice with others, you’re welcome.

Classes are donation based with a suggested donation between £8-£15. Anyone can join at any time, but classes do need to be pre-booked with Nicola on 07740 863 930.

Nicola Whitworth is a Mindfulness Teacher (MBCT) based in London.