Importance of Breathing

Had a great day during our small group, we discussed "Breathe" from one of Rob Bell's Noomas.  Basic message was looking at God as Breathe.  God breathed into Adam to create life from the dust.  We all come into life with our first breath and leave this earth with our last breath.  The name LORD is Yahwey in the Hebrew translation or YHWH.  They often said these letters were breath sounds and that you don't actually say God's name, you just breathe the Hebrew letters.  Our discussion went into how God or breathe is in all of us. 

During the Nooma and our groups discussion I came to an interesting realization. We often don't think about breathing even though we take some 12-20 breaths per minute. To take a breath in it requires an active muscle contraction of the diaphram and other accessory muscles and is always requires active muscle to happen.  When we exhale it can be passive or active.  Which is interesting that God is always active in all of us, He is always active getting into our hearts and souls.  Just as breathing in  always active.  Yet we have a choice with what to do with Him.  We can be active or passive on the exhale.

Another interesting thing that I realized was thinking of patients that I work with that have chronic obstructed pulmonary disease (COPD).  These are patients that always feel short of breath, they are unable to get a deep breath.  The patient often feels like they can't get enough air in, which is partially true.  The real problem is they can't get enough air out to allow them to get air in.  Their lungs are actually hyperinflatted, they can't get rid of the "dead" air in their lungs to allow the "good" to come in.  Because these patients feel short of breath they often increase their breathing rate and take lots of shallow breaths that are inefficient in getting good air exchange and actually burn more energy from trying to take more breaths.  Thus they have an increase need for the oxygen they are not getting in to support the increase breating rate, a horrible cycle.  As part of therapy we work on getting them to control their breathing and slow it down and work to get them to exhale and be active in getting the air out. 

This is an important lesson we can take in real life. 

• The importance of slowing down and getting the bad things inside of us out, so that more of God came come into us.  It's not that God isn't in us, like the COPD patient they already have air in them.  It's that we need to work (be active not passive) to get the bad air out of us so God can come into us.
• We need see the importance of getting deep with God not shallow.  Just as the COPD patient gets into trouble with shallow breaths, and needs to work on slow deep breaths.

Let's take a look at breathing from a health standpoint. Something I find in some patients is poor breathing habits, which can be a part of their problem.  Patients may not fully use their diaphram and over utilize their accessory muscles.  This leads to these muscles overworking and the diaphram not working enough.  The diaphram is vital in it's function with the core stabilizing muscle of the spine.  Many back patients that have poor core muscles have poor diaphram activity.  Any easy exercise to help with this is laying on your back and work diaphramatic breathing.  This is done by taking a long slow breath and making sure your abdominal area rises and then slowly exhale.  Do 5 of these each day when you get out and into bed, it is an easy exercise that can often times do great things for your health.