Encore: Meditation is the only medication you need. Breathe and BE! Wednesday, June 2, 2021

Every system in nature has a push and a pull. Just as we have a system for stress, we have a system for calm, called the parasympathetic nervous system. Unfortunately that is a system that we need to learn how to engage, as opposed to the sympathetic nervous system, which is always active. The sympathetic nervous system is like your body's alarm system, you don't want to disable it, but under conditions of stress, whether real or perceived, when the sympathetic nervous system engages the fight, flight, freeze response over a protracted period of time, it is no longer adaptive and begins to downregulate the body's immune system, causing unhealthy levels of anxiety and ultimately sickness and dis-ease. The so called parasympathetic nervous system, otherwise known as rest and digest or feed and breed, relaxes muscles and conserves energy. 7/11 breathing is an ideal way to engage the parasympathetic nervous system. Gentle breaths inward, through your nostrils for a count of 7 and a longer, slower outbreath for a count of 11, also through the nose, quickly restores the body to a sense of calm and eventually helps with the re-establishment of homeostasis. The phrenic nerve connection, between the brain and the diaphragm, carries hugely important messages to the brain about the status of the body's levels of alertness and arousal or calmness, depending on your breathing. The diaphragm is actually just like a limb, although it is inside your body. The diaphragm moves air in and out of the lungs, at a rate that we decide. In so far as it carries messages to the brain about how active we are, respiration sets the state of your brain. The good news is that we can control how we breathe. Messages through this neural circuit from the brain to the diaphragm via the phrenic nerve and back to the brain stem again, control our sense of emotional arousal and need to be managed, sometimes more than others. Today's guest, Justin Caffrey, is a mindfulness master and is going to share his wisdom with us, on the benefits of meditation to avoid a perceived need for medication of any other, less organic kind. Justin is a firm believer in the benefits of flow state, self-care and cold water swimming, amongst a variety of other daily practices to induce and allow wellness and a healthy sense of well-being. Justin expounds the virtues of doing less, on occasions, to achieve more. Having lost his beautiful infant son, Joshua, ten years ago, Justin resigned from his board and reinvented the architecture of both his business and personal life to find the inner peace, reason and meaning that the trauma of that event hijacked and/or highlighted the absence of, in the first place. Justin has since dedicated his life to a variety of humanitarian causes, not least in his online courses on mindfulness. He posts daily, on various media platforms to inspire and mentor healing in and for others, that find themselves lost in the moment, or in life, with a core fracture of any kind.