What Is Heart-Centered Breathing?

Heart-Centered Breathing is the very first social-emotional tool Breadcrumbs offers young children!

What is Heart-Centered Breathing?

Heart-Centered Breathing is a simple, research-backed SEL practice that helps children calm their bodies, regulate emotions, and connect with their innate capacity for compassion and emotional intelligence.

Simply put, it is a calming, centering practice that involves focusing attention on the area around the heart while breathing slowly and deeply.

This practice, pioneered by a group of doctors and scientists at the HeartMath Institute in Boulder Creek, CA in the 1990’s, is designed to help adults and children alike: regulate emotions, reduce stress, and promote a state of “heart-brain coherence” where the heart, mind and emotions are in energetic alignment and work in harmony. From this state of balanced awareness we are able to access the incredible intuitive guidance of the heart!

Heart-Centered Breathing enables children to connect quickly and easily to their innate, loving predisposition – a deep, centered reservoir of kindness, compassion, empathy and LOVE rooted in their hearts.

Can You Breathe Wrong?

The act of breathing is involuntary for living beings. We hardly ever pay any attention to, or put any effort into our breathing. We inhale and exhale at an unthinking pace and regularity that keeps us alive, but what if we’re doing it all wrong? Or, at the very least, we could be breathing much more carefully and mindfully, to our own benefit and even the benefit of those we love!

According to experts, a successful breath is one that is deep, fully fills the lungs, and reaches the belly. Sadly, in today’s world many of us are steeped in stress and fail to breathe with such care and diligence. Humans are designed to take shallow breaths when they feel threatened or experience any intense emotion, because of an in-built fight-or-flight response that contracts our muscles and makes us tense, causing us to limit our intake or hold our breath.

Young babies exhibit optimal breathing practices from birth. By focusing on Heart-Centered Breathing at a very young age we develop an awareness of, and cement a connection to, this innate, optimal breathing practice and a sense of what it feels like to be embodied peacefully.

Start With the Heart

What sets the Breadcrumbs Curriculum apart from other SEL programs is that it starts by teaching children that, in addition to their minds, they have another unique source of intelligence within their bodies: the HEART!! The Treasure in your Chest! It is from the heart, the seat of emotional experience, that we truly process and integrate ALL key social-emotional concepts, including love, peace, gratitude, empathy, appreciation, compassion, respect, cooperation, patience, kindness and forgiveness.

Used in Montessori classrooms, therapeutic settings, and homes, this heart-centered breathing practice supports self-regulation, emotional awareness, empathy, and stress reduction in children.

Developed from research by the HeartMath Institute, Heart-Centered Breathing focuses attention on the heart while engaging in slow, intentional breathing. Research shows this practice helps synchronize the heart, brain, and nervous system into a state known as heart-brain coherence, a physiological state associated with improved emotional balance, clearer thinking, and greater well-being.

The Breadcrumbs Curriculum introduces Heart-Centered Breathing as a foundational SEL tool because it is developmentally appropriate, accessible for young children, and rooted in children’s innate capacity for kindness, connection, and emotional wisdom. By teaching children how to breathe with awareness from an early age, caregivers and educators can support lifelong emotional health, self-compassion, and positive social relationships.

“When I was teaching meditation to children in a public school classroom of seven year olds, I asked them “Point to your real self” and everyone in the class pointed to their heart.” - Deborah Rozman, PhD, President and CEO HeartMath Institute

This is the foundational social-emotional tool Breadcrumbs start with, but we invite you to learn about our other tools in our SEL Toolkit!