Somatic Breathwork and your Nervous System

Somatic Breathwork is a simple yet powerful tool that taps into your nervous system - the electrical system of your body.

Your nervous system is designed to process and grow through stressful experiences. But if stress or trauma goes unresolved, over time it causes dysregulation of your nervous system.

When your nervous system is dysregulated, it creates a state of dis-ease within your body.

Dis-Ease = Disease.

Dis-ease may show up in the form of anxiety, depression, chronic stress, physical pain, or illness. You may experience difficulties in your personal and professional life as a result.

Somatic breathwork is a transformative experience that can regulate your nervous system and completely change the way you feel. The state of your nervous system determines how you show up in life, so let’s take a deeper look into your nervous system.

The State of your Nervous System

Your nervous system operates in two different states.

Sympathetic state (Flight/Flight/Freeze) keeps you safe during threatening situations by quickly responding to and adapting to stressful situations
Parasympathetic state (Reset/Digest/Relax) allows your body to rest and repair itself after stressful situations by lowering heart rate and increasing digestion

A healthy nervous system should be able to easily flow between these two states.

However, many of us have become stuck in one of the states (nervous system dysregulation). You become stuck when you do not properly process the stressful experiences you’ve faced. If you are stuck in your fight/flight response, you may feel anxious and on edge often. If you are stuck in rest and digest, you may feel depressed or lethargic.

Humans are animals. And like animals, we are designed to process stress and trauma through our body shortly after experiencing the stressful situation.

Below is an example of how an impala processes stress and trauma through its body directly after the stressful experience (Nervous System Reset).

“In this video, an impala is attacked and almost killed by a cheetah. The instinct of the impala is to activate its Sympathetic Nervous System and go in to fight/flight/freeze. In this situation, FREEZE was its only option as any movement would have only encouraged the cheetah to kill it.

Once the cheetah runs off, the impala still doesn’t move for several minutes, and the first reaction you see is deep belly breathing. This deep belly breathing brings the impala back into a state where its body can process the trauma it experienced. After a few minutes of breathing you will see the impala start to shake uncontrollably until it’s physically cleared out the trauma from its body.

Trauma is not the event that happened. Trauma is what the body stored because of the event that happened.

Once the trauma is cleared from its body, the impala returns to a regulated state and runs off.”

It is increasingly common for humans to suppress the natural responses of the body - suppressing emotion, avoiding feelings, and numbing ourselves to the stress or trauma. By doing this, it creates a state of dis-ease in the body that can lead to anxiety, depression, chronic stress, and disease.

The dis-ease within your body will not go away until you express and release the stuck experience from your body.

Somatic Breathwork taps into the nervous system in a way that allows you to release the past experiences that your body is holding onto. It is a complete nervous system reset, just as nature intended.

Resources to Learn more about Somatic Breathwork

If you want to learn more about Somatic Breathwork, we highly encourage you to go deeper into the following resources: