Why Do We Yawn During Breathwork?
Yawning provides oxygen to the brain
We are thoracic breathers. We breathe from our chests rather than our diaphragm (our belly). We breathe into our shoulders (which has no lungs) and think that we’re breathing deeply. Sometimes we yawn regardless if we’re tired, bored, or energized. You yawn because your body is asking for more oxygen.
It regulates our temperature
Yawning is also something that our bodies do to regulate our temperature, called thermo regulation. Anytime that you’re doing any type of mindful practice, whether it’s very active or chill, mindfulness practices gets you from a sympathetic nervous state into a parasympathetic nervous state. Your sympathetic nervous state keeps you super hyper vigilant: flight, fight, freeze, or fawn response that keeps you in survival mode. Your parasympathetic nervous state is the rest state where you receive all the benefits that your body naturally does: the healing, the ways it optimizes itself for healing.
The yawn signals that we’re trying to regulate our body temperature. Not too hot, not too cool, but somewhere in the middle.
When you go from the hyper-vigilant state state to the rest state and into this calming rest and digest state, your body temperature changes, it cools down. It stops the over-production of things active in the sympathetic nervous system. A lot of hormonal production that was super active gets to relax. There are other variables in your body that activate in the parasympathetic nervous system, like your digestion, which is now active. This is why you may feel different types of heat and coolness in different parts of your body. Where you feel these temperature changes depends on what is adjusting or being activated in your body at that time.
3. It’s an energetic release
If you feel certain things while meditating such as, tearfulness crying, sweating, wanting to shake, feeling the need to use the bathroom, or wanting to release a certain way, it’s because energetically, we want to release through fluids, shaking, the different ways your body has the capacity to move energy that have been stagnant in your body. Even though you’re not moving, there are still emotions moving in your body, (energy in motion), chemicals, and breath. The stagnant energies in your physical body are starting to move through. Everyone experiences this release differently.
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Shanila Sattar is the founder of Flow Breathwork Facilitator Training, author of Breathe, a 4th generation sound healer, women’s researcher, national speaker, and host of a Top 6 podcast, The Playground. She is the creator of AlwaysPlay Studios and The Integrative Healing Academy, where she trains sound healers, breathwork facilitators, and mentors aspiring healers in the healing arts.
