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Sometimes just as you're making headway -- breathing better and feeling fewer health symptoms -- something suddenly happens that makes you question whether you're on the right path.
Here is a great explanation about what's going on, that I just came across reading a book called "Movements That Heal" by Dr. Harald Blomberg of Sweden. This is not a book about breathing, but it offers one of the best explanations of clearing reactions I've seen.
Here's what Dr. Blomberg says about reactions to the easing of long-term muscle tension, which is what we're doing when we're breathing correctly using techniques and intention to relax the breathing muscles and all the muscles.
"(Heightened emotional reactivity) can also be caused by the easing of muscle tensions that we have acquired by long-term emotional stress and repression of our feelings of sorrow, anger or anxiety. When muscle armouring and defensive postures start relaxing we can react with irritation or depression as we start to release the repressed feelings.
"When we get scared or angry we contract the muscles of our legs, hips, back, shoulders and neck, the physical aspects of the fight-and-flight response or startle reflex. Also the diaphragm and the respiratory muscles of the chest are contracted. With a release of these muscles respiration and circulation improve.
"Long-term muscle tension and poor breathing often cause the body to accumulate toxins. With the release of tension the body can get rid of these toxins. Some of the physical reactions to the elimination of these toxins can be:
Coughing up phlegm
Flatulence
Nausea
Diarrhoea
Skin rashes
Itching
Fever
Colds
Swollen eyes
Headaches
Fatigue
Weakness"
Breathing Retraining Center offers individual and group training and coaching on self-management techniques to identify and correct poor-breathing habits. Breathing Retraining Center's educational products, courses and coaching are designed to improve breathing skills for people whose issues may be related to habits that have the potential to be improved, as a self-care/wellness activity. Breathing difficulty may be a warning sign of a life-treatening heart or lung condition, infection or other illness. Always check with your doctor about your own situation.
The Buteyko Breathing Technique and other breathing-retraining strategies we teach are an alternative approach and are not the practice of medicine, psychology or a form of psychotherapy, nor are they a substitute for seeking medical or psychological advice from an apporpriate professional health-care provider. We want to make the important distinction between using the Buteyko Breathing Technique and other breathing-retraining strategies for health and well-being and the practice of medicine, psychology or any other licensed health-care profession.
Breathing classes, coaching and other services from Breathing Retraining Center are offered by teachers who are not licensed by the State of California as physicians or other healing-arts practitioners unless so noted. We offer alternative non-medical/non-psychological techniques and our services are considered to be laternative or complementary to the healing arts that are licensed by the State of California.