Cultivating Breath Awareness Day 2

Welcome to this sequence of breath awareness meditations, where we will dive deep into the breath and how it can guide us from automatic pilot into Presence in our daily life. Set 12 min aside to dive into why the breath is so connected to our emotions and how we can change our emotional experience through the breath. Finishing with one of my favorite breathing practices to calm and expand our lung capacity. These sequences of meditations are meant to take you in a journey, to start to open the door of Awareness into our daily lives. The more conscious we are of how we breathe, the more present we can be with Life.
Music Pitor Witowski from Pixabay
Picture Marvol from Pixabay

Transcript

Today we will begin again checking in with our breath. So just take a moment to focus on how are you breathing in this moment. How are you feeling today? Taking these few seconds in silence to tap in with yourself. Observing your body, Your breath, With no need to change anything. How is your breath moving with every inhale and every exhale? To begin let's take three deep inhales and as you exhale sigh it out through the mouth. Two more deep breaths. One more deep breath. Becoming aware again of the natural breath flowing in and out through your nostrils. Stay connected with your breath as we dive into why the breath is so connected to our emotions. Yesterday we learned the anatomically correct way of breathing. Just by coming into this correct way of breathing we can create more space for deeper breaths and relaxation on our diaphragm muscle and the organs. Already releasing any stored tension accumulated from the reverse breathing pattern in the body. We also practiced the five five five calming breath technique which hopefully you could feel its effects in your emotional and mental body. But why does this happen and how does it happen? Well our breath and emotions are like two sides of the same coin. They are closely related and linked together. Different emotional states have different types of breathing patterns. This means that if you breathe like an emotion for a certain amount of time you will start feeling that emotion either consciously or unconsciously. This kind of communication happens both ways. For example if you are unaware of your shallow breath which obviously creates a more rapid breathing you are feeding your body the breathing pattern of emotions such as fear anger or anxiety causing your body to feel stressed tired and overworked. But if you start to slow your breath down you start to feed your body another emotional state and the most amazing thing is that other chemicals begin to navigate through your bloodstream. Let's take a pause here to come back to our breath awareness taking one deep inhale through the nose and exhale sigh it out through the mouth. One more time deep breath in through the nose and sigh it out. I'll say this again over breathing over a long period of time or mouth breathing will create stress to our system. 80% of the information that the brain receives is coming from the body to the brain. If you're breathing deeply and relaxed you're sending your brain the messages that everything is okay that you are safe. If you are over breathing you are sending your brain the message to run away to fight to freeze or to people please. The way we breathe affects our nervous system so breathing slowly is sending the messages into our nervous system that we are saved and relaxed. Another bad habit of breathing is that we unconsciously hold our breath. There are studies that say that 70 to 80 percent of people working on computers are holding their breath creating in the body a sense of lack and again a sensation of fear or avoiding. So to summarize there is an anatomically correct way of breathing this alone will give your body more room for a longer deeper more relaxed breath and today we have learned why our breath is so closely related to our emotions. Observing breath and emotions like the two sides of a coin one will feed the other. Emotions have different breath patterns and the way you breathe can create an emotional state and this happens whether we are conscious about it or not. Because of this communication of information flowing from the body to the brain therefore our breath influencing our nervous system and the chemicals that run through our body. Today we will have another easy calming practice. We want our body to get used to this easeful feeling of a gentle calming breath. At the same time we will be focusing on expanding our long capacity. For this breath I'll ask you to sit comfortably with the back straight and the least amount of tension in your body. We will do our breath through a round mouth as if you were whistling. You can choose to do this breath with the eyes closed or opened. So get into your comfortable position your back straight no extra tension taking a few breaths again to just feel your body in this moment. If you want to close your eyes allow the gaze to come down to your heart or your belly or you can bring it up to the space between your eyebrows you can choose. Take one more deep inhale through the nose exhale round your mouth and start to inhale and exhale through a rounded mouth. Keep going stay with the breath remember every time you inhale deeply through your round mouth your belly and chest expand. Every time you exhale through the rounded mouth everything contracts gently back to the center. We will be in this practice for a total of five minutes so continue enjoying the sound of your breath. Take a deep inhale through the mouth hold the breath in allow your belly your chest your back everything to expand with your breath and when you're ready gently exhale through the mouth and just observe how you feel. Coming back to the normal natural breathing in and out your nose. Take one more deep inhale exhale sigh it out starting to blink your eyes open. Tomorrow we will start with more energizing breath practices. Feel free to stay with these two calming practices or come back to them as many times as you need and if you're ready to move on I'll see you tomorrow for our active breaths.