BIG Dragon Little Dragon Breathing

I love Donal and Cathy’s kids Ryan and Josh. I had the opportunity to work a bit with Ryan helping him to turn around his inverted breathing pattern and re-establish core control. Children, like adults can develop and inverted breathing pattern from being in frightening situations. Children the have a challenging birth process can begin life with an inverted breathing pattern as well. When I looked into Ryan’s soul-path, I found some challenging issues that he came into this life with. These issues can trigger an inverted breathing pattern, which means that the person tightens their abdomen on inhalation instead of relaxing it. The inverted breathing process is quite challenging for the body because it results in greatly reduced diaphragmatic excursion, which results in significant loss of oxygen exchange do to the fact that the lung is not being fully inflated. This may cause stasis in the unused area of the lung, which can create a favorable environment for pathogens. Additionally, when a person tightens their abdomen with inhalation, there is tremendous load placed on the respiratory system. If the breathing pattern is inverted for very long, the primary respiratory muscles fatigue, resulting in accessory respiratory muscle over-use. This typically comes with great risk of shoulder pain, neck pain syndromes and headaches. It often causes anxiety as well. I thought you might like to see us working together breathing the BIG Dragon into his belly and breathing out the little dragon.We spent about 30 minutes breathing together and then Ryan taught his father Donal. I like to use terminology kids can understand, so I taught Ryan that by breathing into his belly, he could make Big Dragons! By breathing out through his mouth or nose fully, he can release the dragon. We did a number of exercises to relax his mind so his nervous system was more receptive to the new pattern. Faulty breathing patterns can be challenging to correct because the average person breathes 25,900 times daily, so imagine how deeply ingrained a pattern that is executed so many times a day could become!

Here, I’m using Ryan’s hair to give him a sense of lift. By giving him a source of feedback, he can align his body to the point of having good posture with ease. So many therapists make the mistake of “forcing good posture”. When this happens, the natural efficiency that posture should offer us is gone and it is easy to feel tired all the time, which typically results in over-consumption of sweets and high energy drinks, or coffee, tea, Red Bull and the like; which occurs, sadly, in both children and adults.

Here you see Ryan’s father, Donall Carr. Donall is one of my instructors and I’m sharing methods for keeping a child actively engaged in the learning process. Donall and his wife Cathy do a marvelous of feeding, caring for, loving and educating their children. They attend a Steiner school (Waldorph school) here in Sydney, Australia where they get fantastic whole-brain learning. It’s been fun for me to watch them both grow over the last several years.