Moving Into Harmony

MOVEMENT & BREATHING: HEALTH / PERFORMANCE PROGRAMS

Oxygen Advantage

The Breath: Your Best Companion in Healing and Growth

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In every moment of your life, your breath exists. From your first cry to this very moment, your breath has been your constant companion, and there to do for you what you do. Yet how often do you pause to consider this remarkable process that bridges your conscious and unconscious being? your physical activity and your physiology? your health and your performance?

How frequently do you recognize that within your breath lies perhaps the most powerful tool for health, transformation and performing well with all activities you do?

The One Thing You Can Control – Your Breath

In a world that feels more and more overwhelming, your breath offers something unique – it’s the one aspect you can consciously influence to change the state you are in. While your heart beats and your digestive system functions without your direct input, the breath stands at the crossroads of automatic and voluntary control. This unique position makes it a powerful gateway to influence your physical, mental and emotional well-being, and the state of your physiological health.

Beyond Just Breathing

Many, I work with initially, think of breathing as a simple in-and-out process, but it’s far more integrated. Your breathing pattern is both a mirror and a modifier of your internal state. When you’re stressed, your breath reflects this through rapid, shallow patterns. When you’re at ease, your breath flows with natural rhythm and depth. And there is a pause as your breathing becomes more healthy and functional to the activities you do. But here’s the fascinating part – this relationship works both ways. By consciously working with your breath, you can actually shift your internal state, and your breathing signals to your brain what is needed in the moment – run or relax.

Three BIG Benefits of the Breath Practice

Understanding breath’s potential begins with recognizing its three core capacities:

Self-Regulation: Your breath is an always-available tool for managing your internal state. Like a skilled sailor adjusting their sails, you can learn to use your breath to navigate life’s challenges, finding your center even in challenging and turbulent times.

Self-Healing: Your body holds innate capacities for recovery, renewal and regeneration. Breathing practices can activate these natural healing mechanisms, supporting everything from better performance, to better sleep, to enhanced immune function.

Resilience: Through awareness and attention to your breathing and the outcomes of your practices, you develop not just momentary calm but lasting adaptability. Adaptability in a broader range. This isn’t about achieving a permanent state of ease – it’s about building the flexibility to move through life’s challenges with greater capacities and confidence.

The Intelligence of Your Body

Your body’s intelligence of integrated systems are intricately connected through breathing. From the core-base stability that grounds you to the intricate dance of your nervous system, from what comes in to what is released, your breath influences it all. The simple act of nasal breathing, for instance, triggers the release of nitric oxide, supporting healthy blood flow and immune function. Your lower belly breathing center (known traditionally as the Lower Dantien) serves as both a physical anchor and an energetic foundation for stable, sustainable breath patterns.

Starting Your Journey

The beauty of training the breath lies in its accessibility. You don’t need special equipment or a particular setting – your breath is always with you. All you need is your attention and a developed felt sense. Begin by simply noticing: Where is your breath moving? What’s its quality? How does it feel is key to knowing if it’s healthy or not. Then feeling how it changes throughout your day with the different demands you face is such an incredible learning tool? This awareness itself is transformative.

As you develop this relationship with your breath, you’ll discover it becomes a reliable companion in:

  • Managing stress responses – turning them from negative to positive stressors
  • Supporting quality sleep – best recovery bests the previous demands
  • Enhancing mental clarity – relaxed focus produces learning and meaningfulness to what you learn to use in your life
  • Building physical stamina – to endure life’s known and unknown challenges
  • Creating emotional balance – for better relatedness to those that are important in your life, and how to not allow the breath to give you away.

An Invitation

Whether you’re navigating demands that produce stress, recovering from the conditioning of the trauma(s) you’ve faced, or simply seeking greater health capacities, your breath offers a path forward. It’s not about achieving perfect breathing – it’s about developing a relationship with this fundamental life force activity that supports your journey of growth, healing and performing well in your life.

Start simply. Take moments through your day to feel your breath. Notice where it moves in your body. Observe its rhythm and behavior without trying to change anything – this is a HUGE skill. This simple act of attention begins a profound journey of discovery.

Upper Chest Middle Chest Lower Belly Natural Breath Wave Inhale Exhale Head floating Shoulders relaxed Sit bones grounded

Remember, every breath offers a new beginning. Every exhale is an opportunity to let go, and every inhale brings fresh possibility. Your journey with your breath is uniquely yours, but you don’t have to walk it alone. Consider joining me for a deeper exploration of these practices in an upcoming course I am teaching through OLLI@SOU, where I will be guiding curious people like yourself through practical tools for harnessing your breath’s potential through trauma, stress to enhance your resilience and immunity.

Author’s note: Interested in exploring these concepts further? My six-week course “The Breath through Trauma, Stress & Immunity” offers a comprehensive journey into the transformative power of breath work. Contact me to learn more or click here to register for the course.

It’s Time to Stop normalizing the pain. Start discovering your potential!

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It’s time to find real solutions to your struggles and barriers to you moving well in your life. No more normalizing the pain that limits you and the things you want to do in your life.

Why does someone begin normalizing their pain? Because they didn’t get the results they believed they could achieve. Because the care they sought had many pitfalls to their success…..with a caveat – they participated in their attempts to resolve their pain and were committed to moving better in their lives. Over 30 years of working with people struggling to move well again, I often have the experience of helping people who did not succeed in their previous care for their pain. And over those 30 years, these were the common things true to today that they presented me with:

  • Not getting the resolution they want because the pain returns – the result of treating the painful area rather than the patterns and tendencies that are involved (it’s been identified, the rate of success among musculoskeletal pain and dysfunction was less than 60% with physical therapy care, and why most payers for the care have downgraded the tier of value for physical therapy services since 2019…and it keeps getting less valued, which means less valuable care by those dependent on being reimbursed….it’s important you know this) . I see this many times over….the painful region is often the over-worked region, taking over the roles of the compensated and dysfunctions elsewhere. The painful area is often crying for help, it is not the problem. The analogy I give is – you are on a team of 5, and 3 people often don’t show, or worse yet they show up but can’t fully do their role making mistake after mistake…..who is going to be overworked? When you can identify the missing links, your body and mind will work more together, and redistribute the work load for the given tasks of daily life.
  • Missing the mark on the trajectory to health and fitness – “this is as good as it’s going to get” and “I’ll have to do these same exercises the rest of my life” are often phrases people repeat when they see me after getting care elsewhere. Many arrive thinking they are stuck with what they got (and research shows this contributes to apathy, dis-empowerment of health and depression). I don’t believe this! There are somethings that are going to be hard to overcome. And again, what is the focus – it’s usually been on the painful or “degenerative” place, instead of the potential hidden in those places that contribute to your health that have gone dormant and lost from your mind. It’s time to find another avenue to your health.
  • Totally missing key elements in one’s health, such as breathing patterns. Why exercise if your breathing is not supporting your health. This is a very commonly missed vital variable that can actually attenuate a great deal of compensations and imbalances. Imagine with every breath you take, your spine is pulled in a certain direction – and how many times does that torque occur in your day?…..and night? Or the breath is only taken by the upper chest – shallow and fast – leaving the crux of your movement stability in the lower back region to be significantly compromised (research shows a certain breath pattern that almost 90% of a “fit” population demonstrate contributes to low back pain), and yet it’s not even observed by the clinician.
  • Not giving their potential for progress enough time – this is based on a model of “sick-care” that has little vested interest in you becoming a better part of yourself. With a limited number of visits (usually focused on the “wrong” place) that are misdirected by reimbursement concerns rather than what you would benefit from. So after your 4 – 6 visits you are released with what you got. Health care is something totally different in my perspective, and with the right information from screening the movement and breath (the FMS Screen and the BOLT score are well backed clinically and scientifically for over 25 years), the right program can be given, AND the progression comes with your investments – efforts and time, not expensive methods.
  • no long term roadmap to want they want to do – just do these exercises to keep your ________ from hurting. Once the pain subsided or didn’t seem to hamper life, the person would return to what they were doing. And some of those things they returned to doing were hampering their continued progress, often promoting a painful pattern, and would falsely believe the exercises they were given would minimize the problem…….you can see the insanity, and yet this is the common scope of what’s offered to someone struggling to move.

You do have choices, despite what has happened in the past. Give me a try! I think you will be surprised how quickly you can get back on your feet well and gaining confidence in doing the things you want to do, and do them well!

Article by Shawn M Flot, MPT – Masters in Physical Therapy (1994). He is an experienced Certified Oxygen Advantage® Instructor, and Functional Movement Systems specialist. Combined with his 35 years of experience in Exercise Physiology, Physical Therapist for health and performance, and a dedicated Hatha Yoga practitioner, is making for a power-house to help many people succeed in re-discovering their own health and healing, being fit and living well for their adventures.