Breath, Stress, Posture & Resilience

Key themes and aha moments

Hi folks,

Someone mentioned that Body by Breath is so, well, huge, that it can feel intimidating. I feel a little bit like that when deciding how to share within this book club!

I want my posts to be useful and thought-provoking without adding yet another thing for you to read and process. With that in mind, I’m going to simply share lightbulb moments for me in Chapter 1 and I will end with key questions for you to comment on.

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One of the things I appreciate about this book is that it provides such a broad overview of all the components of the body and brain that play into our stress response. Here are some moments in the first chapter that stood out for me.

Chapter 1 begins with a thorough review of the peripheral nervous system (PNS) and although I’m certainly familiar with the nervous system, it’s nice to have the mind-map and the visual that she provides.

She reviews how the PNS is “any part of the nervous system that is not contained in the brain or the spinal cord.” It is divided into two parts: The somatic, which we consciously use to move through space. And the autonomic, which controls your internal organs and is autonomous. In other words, we “can’t will it to do things.”

Most of us who study yoga are already familiar with the two branches that are within the autonomic nervous system (ANS) — the sympathetic and parasympathetic. The sympathetic is our stress response; the parasympathetic is often referred to as “rest and digest.”

💡 I personally needed a review of the third branch within the ANS — the enteric nervous system or the communication pathway between the gut and the brain via the vagus nerve. I feel like I have learned so much about the nervous system over the past few years but couldn’t quite place where it fit into the overall nervous system. She returns to the ENS in more detail in later chapters, so we’ll put a pin in that for now.

💡 Jill points out that because our autonomic responses aren’t within our grasp, we have to “employ a sort of trickery to connect the tissues and functions they govern” and that “meditators, monks, shamans, and witches” have been working on this for centuries. I love this idea! She goes on to point out that in the past these people were considered seekers but now it’s labelled as biohacking. Again — such a brilliant connection to make.

💡 The last thing that stood out to me in this section about the nervous system and stress is that the “breath takes direction from both the somatic branch and the autonomic branch. “In other words your breath is the link between your conscious and unconscious minds.”[p. 26] Of course we intuitively know this — we know that we breathe automatically and that we could consciously manipulate the breath but, what struck me when reading it on the page was — how often do I remember that my breath is both in my control and also a reflection of the way that all of my other systems (my hormones, my mood state, etc) are guiding it?