Student Spotlight

Breath and Growing Up

Growing up in today's society is a unique challenge that, like every generation before it, the evolution of humanity has not yet seen. It is frightening, exciting, fulfilling and worrying to watch my own children navigate childhood and adolescence in a time where our society has strayed quite far from our natural selves, and I believe the breath can be a wonderful tool to help our youth through what can be some difficult times.

Today’s children are exposed to different kinds, depths, and durations of stress in large part due to the digital self. In previous generations, no matter how bad your day was, you could always come home, lock yourself in your room, and at the very least get a break from whatever had happened. There was an escape that offered a physical separation from the stressor itself. But the digital world is always on, always available, and potentially always and relentlessly there to torment.

While I have a lot of thoughts around the impacts of our society’s direction, that’s not the point of this post. The point is that right or wrong, with all of its advantages and disadvantages, life today - especially for young people - generates a lot of stress and “lower-case-t” trauma. And they need as many tools to address this as possible.

One of the most accessible, I believe, is the breath. Oddly enough, the breath was the first tool I was introduced to over 40 years ago, and one of the few lessons I remember from early childhood education. Like many towns across the United States in those days, our schools had adopted a program called D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education or something like that). This was during the “War on Drugs” and consisted of a police officer coming into your classroom and trying their best to instill the greatest amount of fear in the least amount of time in every child present.

But one of those sessions focused on what to do if you were ever offered drugs. The picture of the terrifying drug dealer was painted with plenty of detail. This particular officer emphasized that you would probably be scared, your heart would be racing, you would be breathing heavily and sweating, and the first thing to do would be to calm down. “Take some deep breaths into your belly and put your hand on your bellybutton to feel your stomach expand.”

It didn’t go any deeper than that. There was no history lesson on where this came from or physiology details around why it worked. But we all tried it once or twice and then moved on to the next topic. I don’t remember what that topic was, but I have used that breathing technique ever since.

Fast forward to 2022 and me as a father training as a breathwork facilitator. Upon learning about a number of different techniques early on in the course, both box and 4-7-8 breathing struck me as being particularly useful for kids growing up today. So I was excited to explain them to my 15 and 10 year old children and happy to get the practice. We went through the instructions and practiced a few rounds of each. I didn’t expect it to resonate quite so strongly, but it did. They had both felt the calming effects and had both recognized that they had just acquired a new and very useful skill.

And since then, they have used it regularly. As a tool, they have both told me about multiple situations where they have used these techniques to make their lives a little easier and combat a little stress. Not only has it “worked,” but it has also served as a catalyst for conversations about the things that really matter in their lives and opened an important channel of communication between parent and child.

As with any generation, this one will face many new challenges. But they are also living in a time where more and more is being studied, developed, and advanced in areas like breathwork. While I am extremely happy to have found it and shared this little that I know, I am also hopeful and excited for what they will learn in their lives. I hope that one day they look back on that short lesson I gave them as I do on my own first introduction to breath. In a way that they will always remember, and knowing that they have far advanced their understanding of the larger practice!

This post was written by a student who chooses to stay anonymous.