Mindset and Breathwork
Tara Bianca is my podcast guest this week. She is the owner of BE Light Transformative Therapy which is an online holistic wellness company specializing in therapeutic breathwork and mindset coaching. She is also a certified Oxygen Advantage breathwork instructor.
She had a vision to create a global network of holistic wellness experts from many modalities of practice: from the scientific community to the deeply spiritual.
At the start of 2020 she was working in her small office in Manhattan, NY, and was working with people one on one. The economic shutdown pushed her to step forward to make her dream a reality.
BE Light Transformative Therapy was born, and her online teaching programs draw students from India, South America, Australia, Hawaii and all over Europe. Getting out of her comfort zone gave her the incredible experience of connecting with people from all over the world. BE Light is still in the early stages, but it is something that will continue to grow and expand in the best way possible.
Her story of transformation led her to comment about how, as children, we can have barriers that put a ceiling on us, and we feel like we’re stuck. We feel like we are good boys or girls if we stay inside our box and do what we are supposed to do. We stay on the same path just because it seems the safest. We feel that we’re responsible and that we’re doing the right thing, but inside we feel miserable. We feel like we have more to offer the world, but never take steps to change or go after that EPIC THING burning in our soul.
Overcoming limiting beliefs
She decided to leave New York and move to Florida. There she met her personal coach who she considers her angel. He was the first one who opened her mind and helped her to see beyond her self-limiting beliefs and all the self-sabotaging behaviors. She didn’t realize how much she was blocked by low self-esteem and struggling with fear of other people’s judgment and criticism.
Now, when she looks back, she can’t even believe she had those feelings about herself. She can no longer relate to the person she was. She was able to change her mindset, and that junk no longer exists inside her. She noticed, in her own journey, that when you finally find the courage to take a big step and take massive action, everything starts to fall into place.
As an example of how insecure she once was she shared about how she once worked as an anatomy and physiology educator. In her first year of teaching, the department chair simply asked her for a biopic (a picture that could be on the internet) and she was horrified. Tears started to well up in her eyes, and she refused to share that picture of her class for fear that someone on the internet might see it and judge it without her being able to control the outcome. Now she has hundreds of videos on her youtube channel, with scores of people saying nasty comments all the time.
Tara says that awareness is always the first step to any new habit you want to introduce into your life. You have to recognize what the current habit is and the current pattern if you expect to make any kind of change. Otherwise you are just flying blind, because you don’t have a reference point.
Breathwork practice
Even though she has been in holistic health for almost 20 years, she couldn’t find the right teachers to teach her about breathing. Breathwork was always on the periphery of her health practice, and she decided it was time to know more about it. Breathing is an element that has been in all the ancient philosophies and religious practices. But often there aren’t many specifics, snf sometimes the wording is a bit poetic and hard to understand.
Tara wanted to find breath work that was based on human physiology and anatomy as well as medical and scientific evidence behind it. She wanted to be able to give a strong “why” behind the practice so her clients could trust the process.
Oxygen is our energy source for everything, and, as endurance athletes, runners go beyond what humans used to believe is possible. So how do you take in oxygen more efficiently? The first step is to notice if your mouth is open or closed. If you’re able to keep your mouth closed, your oxygen efficiency is better. What happens to most runners is they feel the need for more oxygen and they start breathing through their mouth because it allows for more air to come in. But getting more air doesn’t give more oxygen, especially when breathing through the mouth.
Breathing through your nose offers several benefits. I warms and filters the air. There is also a molecule called nitric oxide that your body produces in the nasal cavity. Nitric oxide has many benefits, but for ultramarathon runners, perhaps the most important is that it reduces inflammation. It also helps lower blood pressure.
It may feel hard at first, if you want to switch from mouth breathing to nose breathing. The key is to start slowly and adapt your breathing gradually. The first several months you may feel like your training is going backwards. You may run slower. The second key is to practice nose breathing throughout the day and not just when running.
Tara says that mouth breathing is a stress response. The upper chest doesn’t expand fully and sends this subtle stress response to the brain ”I have something to fear” or “I have something to run away from.” Not that the stress response is always bad. We need it. But for runners who run 100 miles and must be as relaxed as they can be and who need to breathe as efficiently as possible, it is a big problem.
Tara says that we act according to a vast database of patterns. We can’t change them all at once. Changes come one after another to get to what we want. But one step at a time. “If you want to change your habits, there are tools to do it. Other people have done it, and you can absolutely do it.”
Connect with Tara:
Website: https://www.belighttt.com/
The 4-Week Breath Boot Camp: https://www.belighttt.com/bootcamp
The Breath Basics 6-Day Challenge (FREE): https://www.belighttt.com/6-days
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tarabelight/
Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/belighttt
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tarabelight
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tara-bianca/
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