3 Ways Breathwork Helps with Cultivating Emotional Intelligence
Inhale slowly for 4 counts. Exhale slowly for 7 counts.
How do you feel?
There is without a doubt a mind-body connection to the breath. When we inhale, we intake oxygen through our nose and into our lower diaphragm and chest filling us up with life. When we exhale, we release carbon dioxide we’ve created through the breathing process, respiration.
But what happens when we start to bring our awareness deeper within this process? What happens when we go beyond the physical body and the anatomy of the breath to feel?
Personal and client experiences have shown me there is an inner journey that happens when we practice breathwork. It brings us closer to our emotions and grows our ability to cultivate emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence is a skill we use for understanding, using and managing our own emotions in helpful ways to relieve stress, communicate effectively, and navigate challenges and conflict. It’s a deeper sense of social and energetic awareness that creates empathy for yourself and empathy for others.
3 ways Breathwork helps with cultivating emotional intelligence:
Breathwork supports the rewiring of our nervous system to respond versus react. Breathwork brings us into a rest and digest state versus fight or flight. States of rest support cultivating emotional intelligence.
When we respond from a place of grounded calm versus reacting from a heightened state of anxiety and stress, we cultivate higher states of awareness and ability to be present with what we are experiencing. Our brains are in a more reflective, non-judgemental space. This helps us accept who we are and what we are experiencing in the present moment versus a need to escape.
Breathwork provides a safe space for self-expression and emotional freedom.
Many of us were not raised in environments where we were taught how to express our emotions. Instead, we are taught that emotions are what makes us appear as “weak”. We’re taught it’s not okay to express anger and that it’s not okay to be afraid. So we bottle them up and repress them or let them run our lives. Cultivating emotional intelligence means knowing how to care for your emotions. It means allowing yourself to express your emotions freely where they are supporting you and your needs instead of locking them up and throwing away the key.
Breathwork provides a safe personal space to express emotions freely. When we focus on a breathing pattern and allow intuitive movement of the body to follow, we can experience emotional freedom. If our body wants to scream, kick, dance, cry, laugh or all of the above, breathwork supports this expression in a directed way within a controlled environment.
Breathwork helps us understand how to use our emotions as information.
Our emotions are often the messengers that allow us to understand what our needs are. The somatic quality of breathwork meditation helps with recognizing emotions as entities separate from us. Although they are part of us, when we experience them in breathwork, we cultivate meaning in them. This allows us to use our emotions as information we need in order to set boundaries, take action and self-soothe.
For example, when you cry during breathwork you might create a meaningful experience with being present with your sadness which then leads you to realize you are grieving a loss you didn’t know you were experiencing. From that space of awareness, you can recognize you need time to grieve and take that information to implement action to support yourself emotionally.
Experiencing our emotions helps us co-create the life we want by showing us the needs we desire to have met and take action. This process is truly beautiful and helps us to develop a deeper relationship to ourselves and our emotions while reconnecting us to the capacity of our own humanity.
When we commit to our breath we commit to being present with ourselves. This includes being present with our mind, body, spirit and most of all - our emotions. Through breathwork, we can cultivate a deeper sense of empathy and emotional intelligence that serves ourselves and serves others.
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This article was contributed by Flow Breathwork Facilitator, Jamie Schumann.
Jamie is a former career counselor turned Breathwork Coach combining Reiki, lunar cycles, and basic astrology throughout her work. She loves creating expansive experiences for herself and others through holistic, practical and radical self-care. As Creatirix of The Garden, she shares how she uses breathwork to support self - awareness, self - love, self - trust and self - acceptance for embodying wholeness.
