Hello and welcome.
Today I'm going to take you through a short exercise on how to breathe using a full belly breath.
This is a breath that has been used by yogis for many years to create relaxation in the body and use the full diaphragm to breathe.
To start,
I want you to bring your awareness to the shoulders and just notice how they're feeling today.
You'll get a general sense of if they feel spacious or if the shoulders are a bit tensed up around the ears.
You'll notice the sides and back of the neck,
The space between your eyebrows,
And you'll notice if it's smooth and spacious or if it feels like it's a little bit more contracted or compressed.
You'll notice how you're holding the jaw and start to get a sense for any residual tension in the body that you're holding.
And now we'll take three deep breaths together,
Breathing in through your nostrils and breathing out through your nostrils.
Breathing in and breathing out.
Last one,
Breathing in and breathing out.
You'll start to find your comfortable seat,
Moving your back away from the chair and placing the soles of your feet on the ground.
You'll let your hands rest and start to press into your sitting bones that you feel the length start to grow from the base up into the crown.
You stack your head over your chest,
Your chest over your hips.
You'll start to slow down that stream of breath,
Feeling for spaciousness in the front,
Sides and back of your ribs.
I want you to imagine that the breath is moving down into the belly first.
And sometimes this can take a couple of rounds to feel.
So you might like to place one hand on the belly and one hand on your chest.
You'll see if you can take a couple of breaths right into the belly without moving the chest.
We'll do this for three rounds.
Breathing into the bottom hand and breathing out,
Feeling the belly relax.
Breathing in,
Expanding into the belly.
Breathing out,
The palm draws back in as the belly empties.
You'll take a few more rounds here in your own time.
We'll move into phase two of this exercise.
You'll take your hands onto the sides of your rib cage.
And as you inhale,
I want you to feel that the hands are drawing away from each other.
As you exhale,
The ribs draw back together as your hands draw a little bit closer together.
Inhaling,
The ribs press out into the hands.
Exhaling,
Full breath out.
You'll feel the body soften closed.
Last one,
Breathing in,
Breathing out.
And again,
You're going to take a couple rounds just in your own time.
Just working with the same technique and starting to get a little bit of practice so you can understand what it really feels like to breathe like this.
I'll give you a couple of moments to practice this and I'll be silent so that you can concentrate.
When we do something repetitively,
It starts to help the brain and the body to create that connection.
So each round you take,
You're starting to build the awareness around the breath.
Now you'll begin to allow the focus to come back into the natural breath.
The hands can come down to rest in your lap.
You'll just check in with the shoulders and the neck to see if you can get a sense for any residual tension that's living here in the body.
Just noticing if it's perhaps different from where you started.
You'll begin to feel into the belly and notice if it feels slightly softer or a little bit more expansive than at the beginning of this practice.
Get a sense for any space that's in the sides or the backs of your ribs from that breath.
You'll notice your chest,
Your belly,
Your ribs expanding and contracting here.
All of this moving with the wave of your breath.
And take a moment to notice if it feels like there's a little bit more ease in the muscles in the body.
You'll get a sense of if that helps you to feel a little bit more relaxed.
This is a practice you might need to do a number of times to start to feel this way and that's completely okay.
I hope you enjoy the sense of ease you started to create in your body and your mind.
I look forward to seeing you back here soon for your next session.
