While working for one of the largest supermarkets in the UK, Niraj Naik collided head-on with his fate – a tryst with an auto-immune disease that wasn’t getting better with conventional medicines. The ‘Renegade Pharmacist’, as he was popularly known, switched to the transformative power of meditation, yoga, and Ayurveda when he was left to choose between a rock and a hard place – a surgery to remove his colon entirely or to participate in a chancy trial for an untested drug.
This quest through the paths of ancient wellness helped him establish a new breathwork school – a treasure trove known as SOMA Breath. The techniques of SOMA Breath are crafted to revolve around an overarching goal – to improve the lifestyle of people with an emphasis on healthy breathing habits.
Remember, breath is the code for your autonomic nervous system. Unlike its other functions, breath can either run on its own or can be managed consciously. At times of stress, you will end up breathing in a way that can harm your body. But with conscious control of your breath, you can restore its balance so that you stay healthy, happy, and strong.
There are a wide array of breathwork techniques which when applied correctly can awaken your ‘inner pharmacy’. Through conscious breathwork, you can turn off stress, turn on digestion, activate your immune system, and achieve a lot more. On that note:
Here are the top 5 reasons to focus on your breathwork
It improves your stress response
Stress is the archenemy of a healthy body and mind; it drains your mental and physical juices used for healing and balancing the body. However, with the help of conscious breathwork, you can signal your parasympathetic nervous system to calm your body. Also, through diaphragmatic rhythmic breathing and Kumbhaka (Breath holds), you can balance the two branches of the nervous system (central and peripheral), enabling it to switch off the stress response in a healthy way. By practising good breathwork, you will start experiencing reduced anxiety, reduced oxidative stress, a focused mind, and a feeling of being connected with every inch of your body.
It helps to attain heart coherence
Effective breathing allows you to create a state called heart coherence; it is achieved when the oscillations of your heart rhythms are coherent and consistent for a long duration. Our heartbeat fluctuates throughout the day (measured by a parameter called Heart Rate Variability(HRV)). Your HRV says a lot about your health as it can predict illness and quantifies your energy level. A cohesive heart and an HRV that syncs with your breathing pattern help your body strike a delicate balance with your emotions. This, in turn, uplifts the operational efficiency of your cardiovascular and respiratory systems. A coherent heart also enables you to attain peak states of mindfulness which is linked with an improved sense of well-being.
It strengthens your immune System
Conscious breathwork keeps your body centred by balancing your physical and emotional elements, leading to diminished stress responses. As a result, your cardiovascular system starts supplying oxygen to your tissues and organs (even to dormant parts of your brain) more effectively. This strengthens your immune system and boosts your stamina. Holding the breath in a specific way creates small packets of safe, beneficial, and low oxygen state in your body. It is a type of resilience-building hormetic stress which strengthens your body’s disease-fighting capabilities, prevents the degeneration of organs and tissues, stimulates cell regeneration, and increases your overall endurance.
It improves your quality of sleep
Unanimously every doctor agrees that good sleep essentially keeps us mentally and physically healthy. With the modern world moving at breakneck speeds, good sleep has become a distant dream for many of us. Slow and rhythmic breathing communicates to your brain to calm down, which has a cascading effect. The brain calms all the other body functions, including lowering your heart rate and blood pressure, triggering a relaxation stage that is the onset of a high quality sleep.
It brings positivity to your mindset
Focusing on breathwork also eases the emotional turbulences in your mind and prevents you from revisiting any past scars. It effectively treats mental depression, PTSD, and anxiety as it helps you unlock your deepest emotions and let them escape from your body and mind. This brings overall positivity to your mindset and enables you to take clear and informed decisions.
Niraj adds that all these benefits can be achieved by practising SOMA Breath techniques. SOMA Breath puts the fundamental techniques of Pranayama in a particular order and makes it effective and accessible for everyone.
Unlike some breathwork schools, SOMA Breath doesn’t focus on just one breathwork technique. It uses intermittent hypoxic training, rhythmic breathing and relaxation and adds movement, music, visualisation, and other yogic practices to boost its efficacy over other techniques. The result? A pharmacy of techniques to improve every area of your life.
Today, SOMA Breath and its followers have expanded their wings across multiple countries in the world. It even has its own curriculum followed in wellness centres and retreats across Europe, the USA, and Asia. We are wishing Soma Breath the best in their future endeavours!
