Conscious Breathing means being Conscious and Aware of your Breathing in the Present moment.

In the Vedas the practice of Pranayama was the path of bringing Prana, that is Life Force Energy, into the system.

Conscious Breathing is a key before and during meditation, to start your day and to finish it before you go to bed at night, to calm the mind, to ease the emotions, to ground yourself in the present moment, to boost the immune system, to regenerate your body, to maintain high functionality of your body organs. Conscious deep breathing is also the vehicle to enter higher states of awareness.

We all breath, and if we didn't we would say goodbye to this world! We all breath, however automatically. Short unconscious breathing, fast panic breathing, chest breathing, create mental, emotional and physical problems! The poorer and more automatic our breathing is, the poorer our health will be. Having less energy, sleeping issues, more worries and mental preoccupation, overwhelming emotions, stomach liver spleen lung heart problems, are a few items on the list of the imbalances that are expressed from a body that is poorly oxygenated.

It has been scientifically tested and proven how different breathing affects our emotions, how our breathing is different when we feel joy than when in a state of fear or panic, and how it is "important in maintaining physiological homeostasis" (1, 2, 3). "Breathing affects our brain regions including the cortex and midbrain more widely than previously thought" (4), it affects our memory and attention (5). Another important point is the fact that our breathing affects the vagus nerve, which regulates our heart pulse with our breathing "in order to optimise oxygen delivery to body tissues" (6) thus a poor breathing due to mental preoccupation, emotional imalance or bodily disease, would directly affect our heart. Deep diaphragmatic breathing engages the vagus nerve and can thus "reduce stress anxiety anger and inflammation by activating the relaxation response of your parasympathetic nervous system" (7). More research is being conducted regarding deep breathing and its affect on the vagus nerve, as a potential treatment for a variety of conditions, "including headaches, rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, bipolar disorder, obesity and Alzheimer's disease" (8).

Now, if you combine deep breathing with repeating a mantra or contemplation, you get meditation and then you might get a brain scan similar to that of a buddhist monk, who after years of conscious breathing and meditation (their meditation practices are completely connected to various special deep breathing techniques)  they got the following results from their brain scan, in a study conducted by the New York University in 2008 (9):

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"Meditation can beneficially change the inner workings and circuitry of the brain, better known as "Neuroplasticity".
The happier parts of the brain (prefrontal cortex) were far more active.
Their brains tend to "re-organize", which means they feel a sense of "oneness" with the world around them.
The brainwave patterns of the Buddhist monks were far more powerful, implying a higher level of external & internal thought.
Their brains had enhanced focus, memory, learning, consciousness, and "neural coordination".
The monks had no anxiety, depression, addiction or anything of the sort.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg, the benefits of meditation are limitless…

In short, the Buddhist monks brains were physically and functionally superior than those without meditation experience"

Amazing right?!

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As my Shaman Teacher once told me, If you are a therapist you must know Breathing!, and for me Conscious Breathing is always a part of any therapeutic session, be that Body Psychotherapy (that incorporates special breathing techniques in order to aknowledge release transform trauma), Reiki, Chakra work, Quantum LIGHT, and really any work that i do, i put special attention to the breathing of the individual, always prompting for a deeper more conscious breathing in the here now!