How to Detox with Breathwork

With every exhale, you are already automatically releasing toxins and metabolic waste from your system. Nature sees to it that it happens. However, you can increase the detoxing effect, improve circulation, and support digestion by combining “kapalabhati pranayama” and “paradoxical breathing” or “reverse respiration.”
By putting these two breathing exercises together, you get a sense of stirring, loosening, or shaking everything up with the rapid breathing, then you use the long, slow paradoxical inhale and exaggerated exhale to squeeze out everything that you brought up.

Breathe Now: Conscious Detox Practice

Breathing in and out through the nose, do a minute or so of kapalabhati pranayama. This means breathing sharp, rapid breaths using your abdominal muscles, focusing on the exhales, and allowing the inhales to be passive or reflexive. Follow this exercise with one or two long slow paradoxical breaths—drawing the diaphragm up and pulling in on your belly button and abdomen while you inhale. (With practice, you can also pull up on the perineum, the area between the anus and the posterior part of the external genitalia.) As you are inhaling through your nose, imagine drawing waste products up out of your muscles, tissues, organs, and cells. And here is the key: continue to draw up on the diaphragm and pull the belly in even more as you exhale, squeezing out all the breath through your mouth—every last bit. When you are done, simply relax everything. A passive or neutral inhale will automatically occur. Do another minute or so of rapid kapalabhati breathing, and then another couple of long slow paradoxical breaths: try to feel a subtle upward tug throughout your body, starting all the way down in your feet or lower legs as you are breathing in.
Draw the breath all the way up through your torso and up to your throat, and then release the breath through an open mouth while you continue to draw the diaphragm up even higher, while you continue to pull in on the belly even more. Squeeze every last bit of air out, and with it, all the toxins you sucked up out of your muscles, tissues, and cells.
When you have squeezed out all the breath, just relax and let everything go. Allow your breath and body to return to a neutral state, and then do another minute or so of kapalabhati. Alternate back and forth between the rapid kapalabhati breathing and the paradoxical breaths.

Here’s another exercise you can do to help release toxins from your system. Take in a breath and hold it in. Then play with the breath as if it is a ball of air that you can move up and down between your chest to your belly, puffing your chest up and then popping your belly out. Move that ball of breath up and down between your lower belly and upper chest.
After some time, release the breath and empty yourself. Then do it again. Take in a breath, lock it into your system with your throat, and bounce and move that ball of air up and down and around in your upper body: sucking the belly in and puffing your chest out, then com-pressing your chest and popping the belly out. After some time, relax and release the air.