How Your Breath Can Heal You

Human breath can heal. For one thing, breath is the gift of life. When you wake up in the morning, if you find you are still breathing, then you should be thankful. Without breath, you are going to die within minutes. Breath is critically important not only to life and living, but also to healing. However, it is equally important that you are mindful of your breath, because your awareness means you are aware of many other things in life, such as your heath, your diet, and, in particular, your thinking, which is mindfulness. This awareness will let you make changes in your lifestyle, such as giving up smoking and drinking.

Unfortunately, like many people, you may have become totally unaware of your breath because breathing is so spontaneous that it is second nature to you that you no longer pay any attention to it..

Every day you may also be bombarded with hypes by the multi-media and modern technology; they become toxic thoughts in your mind, controlling how you think. Your thoughts may have become toxic, affecting your everyday decisions that may lead to your capability to heal over the long haul.

How your breath can heal you.

First of all, correct breathing is critical to your health. Babies breathe naturally. But as they grow up, their breath may have becomes compromised and incomplete.

Correct breathing affects your posture, which affects your physique, including your physical health. Correct breathing means you breathe in sufficient oxygen and breathe out as much as possible all the toxic fumes and carbon dioxide from your body. Breathing is a natural rejuvenation and detoxification process. Unfortunately, you may have incomplete or compromised breathing, leading to shortness of breath and accumulation of toxins inside your body. To have correct breathing (which means the breathing out should be longer than the breathing in) and complete breath (which means you use your diaphragm—the muscle between the lungs and the tummy—to push air and fill up the upper lungs), you have to be mindful of your breath—the breath to heal.

According to Chinese medicine, the two most important health regulators of the body are breath and blood flow. Optimum breathing brings oxygen to every cell in your organs and tissues; while smooth blood flow carries nutrients to nourish them. Without the efficient functioning of breath and blood flow, the overall health of an individual is compromised, resulting in imbalance and disharmony, which are the obstacles to healing.

The Chinese breath is healing breath: it helps you effectively and efficiently use oxygen 24 hours a day. The Chinese breath, as demonstrated by Tai Chi and Qi Gong exercises, lowers your blood pressure, calms your nerves, and alleviates your body pain. In addition, the Chinese breath improves the overall emotional health through clarity of the mind.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

An Empty Mind to Begin Healing

To be diagnosed with an autoimmune disease is a devastating experience for many, especially when the doctor says that there is little or no known cure, except managing the disease symptoms with medications and other undesirable procedures. Self-efficacy, which is self-belief, is critically important in healing and coping with a disease or disorder. You have to believe that humans have a built-in mechanism not only to fight against diseases and disorders but also to get healed from them. As a matter of fact, for thousands of years, physicians and sages all over the world have acquired and assimilated this profound wisdom in healing.

Wisdom is the ability to interpret information in order to influence one's choices in actions that will ultimately transform the body and the mind. Wisdom in healing is therefore the use of right choices for right actions to facilitate the natural self-healing process innate in humans.

To have that wisdom, you must, first and foremost, have an empty mind.

"An empty mind with no craving and no expectation helps us let go.

Being in the world and not of the world, we attain heavenly grace.

With heavenly grace, we become pure and selfless.

And everything settles into its own perfect place."

(Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 3)

The above is taken from the translation of the famous ancient Chinese classic Tao Te Ching.

According to Lao Tzu, the ancient sage from China, who was the author of the immortal classic Tao Te Ching on human wisdom, we must have an empty mind before we can attain true human wisdom. An empty mind means we let go of any pre-conceived concepts and ideas before we can receive new ones. The human mind is often "conditioned" or "programmed" into a certain way of thinking because of the regular input into the subconscious mind, which controls the conscious mind.

It is not easy to have an empty mind because of the presence of the ego-self, which is made up of many attachments that may self-delusively identify who you are. So, to have an empty mind begins with letting go of all attachments, which include emotional and material attachments that are the raw materials with which you have created your ego-self.

How do you let go in the first place?

Letting go is an involuntary surrender; the opposite of conscious holding on. Letting go is a simple and natural process of the human mind. It provides you with real freedom--it is the absence of that feeling you may have of being trapped; it is having no strong feeling about something, whether it happens or does not happen to you.

Over the long haul, letting go may lead to an empty mind. With an empty mindset, you may have reverse thinking, which is not only thinking out of the box but also creating your own box of thinking.

With an empty mind, you may look at your autoimmune disease with totally different perspectives regarding prognosis and treatment. Use your empty mind to heal—just as I used my empty mind to heal my myasthenia gravis.

To find out more about what true human wisdom is, read my published article on Ezine entitled: The Differences between Tao Wisdom and Conventional Wisdom.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© 2016 by Stephen Lau