Gong Breathing Techniques

This will allow your body and mind to destress.  The beauty of this technique is that you can do this while you are doing something else.  You can do this while you are cooking; while you are setting the dinner table; do this while you are cleaning the house getting ready for the festive season celebrations.

A word of warning, please do not use square breathing while you are driving or operating heavy machinery, as this might make you too relaxed that you may doze off or lose your concentration.

The more you do box breathing on a regular basis, the more you will notice stress does not affect you the same way.  So use it when you need, but don't just wait for a stressful moment.

If you have found this box breathing technique useful or would like to learn other QI Gong practices please reach out to us.

This is so effective at relaxing your body that even the US Navy seals have adopted this breathing technique.  They use it to help them regain calm and control of their thoughts when under combat stress.  

So, how do you use it?

Simply, breathe gently through your nose, pause.  Breathe out gently through your mouth with a gentle 'Haaaa' sound, as if you were fogging up a mirror.  Then pause at the bottom.  Then repeat.  You can start by doing this for approximately 1 minute.  As you practice this technique more try to acheive at least 5 minutes or longer.

All breathing uses these 4 parts.  Now sometimes the ratios are different.  Sometimes we breathe in and the pause at the top is so short we don't notice it so it feels like it is not there, but it is there.

Sometimes we breathe in longer than we breath out.  Sometimes we may hold for a long time after we exhale.  So essentially all of these are different breathing techniques.

Basically what we are wanting you to do it breathe with equal parts on all sides.  So the inhalation, the pause at the top, the exhalation and the pause at the bottom are equal, or equal ratio, or use an equal amount of time forming a square or a box.

So the idea would be for however many seconds you breathe in, you would do the same for the pause at the top, exhalation and pause at the bottom. (In the diagram below I have used 2 seconds but you can do it for however long you feel comfortable with).  Don't be too strict with this, but the idea is to make all four parts of your breathe even.

This is a technique called 'Square Breathing' or 'Box Breathing'.  It is a very simple techinique where we get you to draw a box with your breathing.

Your breathing consists of 4 parts:

• Inhalation,
• The pause at the top,
• Exhalation, and
• The pause at the bottom

Relieving Holiday Stress with some simple QI!