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Can breathwork and Christianity coexist? You don't often hear the topic of breathwork being discussed in Christian circles. When people think about spiritual disciplines, breathwork is usually not at the top of their list. Now breathwork, along with biblical meditation, can have a powerful impact on our health and well-being. Now I'm going to suggest that breathwork coupled with prayer and meditation should be a part of every Christian's daily routine.
Let's talk about it.
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we get started I have an announcement to make. Starting next week on June 4th I'm gonna have to change the publication rate of the new episodes to every other week. I used to do that a while back and I'm gonna have to go back to that because over the last couple of months I've been spending a lot of time getting the membership club off the ground and moving forward my focus will continue to be on the membership club so I've had to take a long hard look and
say to myself, what can I actually accomplish in a week? And right now, my bandwidth is maxed out, so something has to get. I just don't have the bandwidth to continue with once a week posting of new episodes. Now, I don't want the quality of my content to suffer, so moving forward from today, new episodes will be published every other week. Now, I know that's a big disappointment for some people. I've actually had some feedback where people wanted to hear episodes every week.
when I was posting every other week. That's why I changed. But right now, this is way I'm going to have to go because I don't want the quality to suffer. So I just want to remind you that if you're going to miss that episode every other week, you can go back and listen to one of the 185 episodes that we already have published. unlike some podcasts, some podcasts cover current events or politics or maybe celebrity gossip.
those types of episodes, those podcasts, they get still pretty quickly. But my podcast, this Christian Healthy Lifestyle, I share timeless truths. So a lot of podcast hosts say, well, don't go back and listen to my first 50 episodes. They're just terrible. Just stay away from those. But I think some of my best stuff is back in those old archives. So on the bi-weeks, when I don't post a new episode, feel free to go back all the way to episode zero if you want and listen through. There's a lot of good content there.
and you can still look forward to a new episode the following week. I appreciate your understanding. So let's get on to the topic of today, breathwork and meditation. Most Christians I know shy away from things like breathwork. Breathwork has an ungodly connotation to it, and sometimes with good reason. So just because some people abuse something doesn't mean that we need to reject that idea entirely. Breathwork, along with biblical meditation,
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can be an important part of the Christian healthy lifestyle. I want to take a little time to make the case that breath work is a solidly biblical concept. Breath has significant meaning in the Bible. Psalm 33, 6, by the word of the Lord, the heavens were made and by the breath of his mouth, all their hosts. here we see the breath of God having great creative power.
The word for host is Zavah, which means a great army or the sun, the moon, and the stars, or the galaxies. So God literally spoke the cosmos with all the billions of galaxies into existence with one simple forward sentence, let there be light. Now God didn't just create our sun or our star, but billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy and
simultaneously created billions of galaxies. This is really awe-inspiring. There's something very special about the breath of God. Psalm 145.5 says, on the glorious splendor of your majesty and on your wonderful works, I will meditate. When I was flying as an airline pilot, I used to like to dim the lights at night and look up at the stars.
Especially if we were flying over the water where there was no city lights or there was an undercast layer of clouds that would block the city lights, we can see stars in an incredible way up there. Up there, stars don't twinkle. They shine. They shine steady. And we did that one night. And I was flying with a guy who was really into astronomy and used to bring binoculars so we could look at the constellations and look for other galaxies and stuff up there. It was pretty cool. So one night we're up at about 39, 40,000 feet. And I was looking above us and I could see
Milky Way what appears to be like a cloud a white milky substance up above us So I said to this guy was flying with hey, you know a lot about this. There's a very little weather above 40,000 feet So what's that cloud that we're seeing up there? And he said Dave that's not a cloud That's billions of stars that make up the Milky Way And my jaw was just on the floor. I I was just in awe of God's creative power
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that he can place that many stars. Bible says he knows them by name. Now, as believers, when we look up the night sky, it should be reminder of the awesomeness of God and the mighty power he has in his breath. It should make us tremble. And then we see in Genesis 2-7, then the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.
and man became a living being. So here we see God giving Adam, the first man, his breath, and that was the moment Adam came to life. The creation of life is a miracle that's even more staggering than the cosmos. It's really awe-inspiring and breathtaking when you think about it. In the New Testament, we see Jesus using his breath for a very special purpose as well. In John chapter 20, verses 21 and 22,
So Jesus said to them, again, peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, I also send you. And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, receive the Holy Spirit. So in Genesis 2, God put life inside of Adam's body with his breath. And here we see Jesus doing something similar by granting the Holy Spirit to live inside the disciples' bodies.
and he used his breath to do it. There's something very special about the breath in the Bible. Not only that, we use our breath to speak and our words have great power. Proverbs 18, 21, death and life are in the power of the tongue. So there's something very powerful about breath. I believe that God created us with the need to breathe firstly because God breathes and we're created in his image. But not only that,
God wants to remind us that He provides the air and every breath we take is a reminder that we're totally dependent on Him as our source of life. So is breathwork biblical? You bet it is. So just because some people use breathwork in a non-biblical fashion doesn't mean that we should throw the baby out with the bathwater. As believers, we should embrace breathwork and meditation as part of our natural design.
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Let's talk about some non-biblical ways that some people use breathwork in meditation. Practitioners of transcendental meditation will use breathwork along with a personal sound or mantra in an attempt to empty their minds of any coherent thought. Now that's where the term transcendental comes from. That style of meditation seeks to transcend everyday coherent thoughts.
These people believe that emptying their minds will bring them more peace. And in one sense, it will. If our thought lives are filled with stressful thoughts and worry and dread, getting rid of those thoughts will bring some sense of peace. But here's the problem. Nature abhors a vacuum. When there are no deliberate thoughts occupying our minds, we become vulnerable to attacks from the enemy. There is a spiritual warfare aspect to all this.
When Satan tempted Adam and Eve, he suggested or planted an idea in their minds. The idea he planted in their minds was, God's lying to you. He's holding out on you. You need to take matters into your own hands. And we all know what happened next. It didn't lead to good things. Just because we're living in the 21st century doesn't mean we're immune to that type of attack. 2 Corinthians 11 3.
But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your minds will be led astray. In the previous chapter, 2 Corinthians chapter 10 verse 5, we're told to take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. So the enemy would love it if we regularly let our defenses down and open the door to our thought lives so that he can have his way with us. That's not
biblical use of meditation or breath work. That's what transcendental meditation encourages and that's why as believers we should stay away from that type of meditation and the accompanying breath work that often goes along with it. The Bible never encourages us to empty our minds. We're taught to meditate on the Word of God. Joshua 1 8, this book of the law shall not depart from your mouth but you shall meditate on it day and night.
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Psalm 119 is loaded with references to meditating on the Word of God. Verse 15, I will meditate on your precepts. Verse 27, I will meditate on your wonders. Verse 48, I will meditate on your statutes. By meditating on the Word of God, we draw nearer to Him, and that's never a bad thing. I often say we maximize our health potential by aligning our lives more fully
with God's natural design for spirit, mind and body. If we're not immersing ourselves in His Word, how do we know what His design is or what His preferences are? Now I contend that using breath work enhances our experience of meditating on the Word of God. Just as praising God in song or worship before a sermon will enhance our experience, the same is true with doing some breath work before we sit down to study the Word or
to meditate on the Word of God. Isaiah 26-3, the steadfast of mind you will keep in perfect peace because he trusts in you. More peace brings more health. And remember from John chapter 20, Jesus, before he breathed the Spirit into them, he said, peace I give to you. So along with God's breath and his Word comes more peace and more peace brings more health.
Proverbs chapter 4 verses 20 and 22, my son, give attention to my words, incline your ear to my sayings. Do not let them depart from your sight. Keep them in the midst of your heart for they are life to those who find them and health to all their body. Do you see the connection here? Biblical meditation can promote health and well-being. It's pretty obvious when you look at things in this context. So
How do we use breath work to enhance our meditation or our alone time with God? And exactly how does that promote health? Well, I'm glad you asked. The first thing we've got to understand is how our autonomic nervous system is designed. Our autonomic nervous system handles bodily processes without any conscious thought in our parts. It's in charge of things like breathing, heart rate, digestion, hormone production,
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when our eyes need the blink and a whole lot more. There's two different divisions of the autonomic nervous system, the sympathetic or the fight or flight and the parasympathetic, which is our rest and digest side. Now these two divisions act like a seesaw when one is up, the other is down. They can't both be up or down simultaneously. It goes back and forth. There's an ebb and a flow to it. And most of us are spending way too much time in sympathetic dominance because
we live a very stressful lifestyles. When our fight or flight reflexes jacked up all the time, our bodies are producing more stress hormones, our blood pressure rises, our heart rate and respiration rate increase, our bodies are preparing us to handle an immediate threat. Well, with our modern lifestyles, usually those threats are not so immediate. We're not having to run away from lions these days, but our body still responds the same way.
Now, if we do need to run away from a lion, that task is far more important and urgent than, let's say, detoxifying from heavy metals or something like that. When our bodies are in a parasympathetic state, they relax and recover. You see, our bodies prefer to things like cellular repair and detoxification while we're in a parasympathetic or rest and digest state.
One of the best ways we can fight back against sympathetic dominance is by using breath work. By intentionally slowing our respiration rate, we activate the parasympathetic side of the nervous system and we increase our heart rate variability or HRV. Now might have heard about this if you've done any research on some of these wearables these days. These Bluetooth wearables can measure our heart rate variability.
Now that sounds like, man, that sounds like kind of medical, Dave, are you getting too technical on us again? No, this is really pretty simple. A fifth grader could understand this. Heart rate variability, or HRV, is proving to be an excellent marker for our present state of well-being. When you have a smaller or shorter heart rate variability, it points to stress, and that stress can contribute to increased risk of all kinds of undesirable health outcomes.
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The quickest way to move from sympathetic dominance to parasympathetic dominance is by combining breathwork and meditation that includes contemplation on the Word of God. So what does this look like in practice? I've reserved the specifics on exactly what my technique is for making a rapid shift from sympathetic to a parasympathetic state for the private version of the show. That's available inside my Christian Healthy Lifestyle Community.
If you'd like to have full access to the full version of these episodes, go to my website, ChristianHealthyLifestyle.com and pick a membership tier that works right for you and I'll see you on the inside. Now the first thing to understand about breath work is our bodies were designed for diaphragmatic breathing. When we're stressed, we tend to do chest breathing. In other words, when we inhale, our diaphragm, that area just below the rib cage, should rise.
The chest should stay relatively stationary during most of the inhale. If you're really focusing on filling your lungs with air to the maximum, your chest will eventually rise. But for most of the inhaler, it shouldn't. One way you can practice this is to lay down on your bed or couch or maybe on the floor with a yoga mat and put a book on your stomach and take a deep breath and watch what happens to the book. On the inhale,
book should rise dramatically and on the exhale it should go down. If the book's not moving or moving very little that probably means your chest breathing. Chest breathing causes stress and it keeps us in a sympathetic or fight-or-flight state. It'll really interfere with reaching that calm parasympathetic state that we want. So if you're using breath work to calm your anxiety you'll have to practice this when you're not feeling anxious.
it's much more difficult to do efficient diaphragmatic breathing when you're already in a stressful state. So by practicing diaphragmatic breathing when you're not feeling stressed, you'll give yourself the ability to do it effectively even when you are stressed. Now if you're dealing with anxiety, you've likely been chest breathing for many years. Be patient with yourself. It may take some time to learn the proper technique, but it's worth the effort.
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I've mentioned before in the podcast that I have a sauna and a cold plunge in my house. Now, both heat and cold can be used as forms of a hermetic stress where our sympathetic nervous system gets jacked up temporarily, but that's a good thing. Our nervous systems, like any other body part, need exercise. Short bouts of heat and cold give our nervous system practice and cycling in and out of the sympathetic and parasympathetic states.
That's a good thing. Now. This is especially true when we're immersed in the cold water I've developed a pattern or a form of breath work when I'm in the cold plunge that I found to be very very effective When you first get in the cold water your body will be screaming. What are you doing to us? This is dangerous Get out of here quickly And I found that during that time Breath work can help my body and my mind to rapidly shift from a sympathetic
jolt into a calming, peaceful, parasympathetic state. And without good breath work, that just doesn't happen. Now we've got to slow our breathing down to make that shift. There is a method of breath work that many people find useful. It's especially useful when you're feeling anxious. It's called box breathing. Now box breathing is where you imagine the four sides that make up a square. Start on the left vertical line at the bottom of that line.
and move your way up in your mind's eye. Move your way up that line and breathe in for five seconds. Then go across the top of the square by holding your breath for five seconds. And then go down the second vertical line, exhale for five seconds. And then connect the square with the bottom horizontal line and hold your breath for another five seconds. Now that works for lot of people, but for me, I prefer to make my exhale about twice as long as my inhale.
seems to work better at that way. It's a more rapid way of entering into that calm, peaceful state. Our bodies have an easier time relaxing during the exhale. So whatever form of breath work you choose, I recommend you exhale for much longer than you inhale. If the box breathing works for you, go with it. But I found that the longer exhale works better. You don't have to be in a cold plunge to use this technique. If you feel stressed in any way, psychologically,
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or physiologically, breath work is a powerful tool to rapidly bring you into a parasympathetic state. If you're feeling anxious, do some breath work. If you're having trouble falling asleep, do some breath work. If you're having trouble focusing on your Bible study, do some breath work. So let's summarize. Breath work can have a negative connotation because it's attached to things like transcendental meditation that are very ungodly. However,
The Bible clearly supports the idea that breath work was God's idea in the first place. And just because some people pervert that idea doesn't make it bad. Proper breathing techniques can help our bodies rapidly make the shift from sympathetic or fight or flight to parasympathetic or rest and digest. And our bodies prefer to do the repair work and their healing during a parasympathetic state. Breath work
combined with contemplation on the Word of God is even more effective. if you want to listen to the full version of these episodes, go to my website, christianhealthylifestyle.com, choose a membership tier that works for you, and you'll have access to the full version of the podcast, as well as being part of the community of like-minded believers, and a whole lot more. And don't forget, starting next week, I'm going to be posting every other week. So if you don't see a new episode next Wednesday, have no fear.
I'll be there the following week. And if you want something to listen to that week, go and check out some of those back episodes. There's a lot of them are really quite good. That's it for now. Thank you for listening. I appreciate you. Go out there and live abundantly. I'll talk with you next time. Be blessed.
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