Hello and welcome.
Today I'm going to guide you through a short exercise on how you can sit optimally so that you can get a full and efficient breath.
To start,
We're going to take three deep breaths together.
Taking a deep breath in through your nostrils.
A nice long breath out.
Breathing in.
And breathing out.
Breathing in.
Breathing out.
Great.
Now we're going to find a place where your spine can be fully aligned.
So you'll start by leading your back away from the back of your chair.
You'll be holding yourself upright.
The soles of your feet can rest on the floor.
You want them to be stacked just below the knees or somewhere thereabouts.
Your hands are going to rest on your thighs and you can feel that your shoulders are nice and supported here.
Then we're going to focus on the sitting bones and press into them so that you start to feel the lower back lengthen and lift.
You're going to feel that lift up to the middle of your back.
All the way up to the crown of the head.
You might start to sense that the body is nice and strong in the back.
The front of the body is open.
You're going to give the chin a little gentle talk towards your throat so that you feel space in the two sides of your neck.
You'll feel a gentle lift through the crown of the head like you're being held up by an invisible string.
You'll sense the weight of the shoulders heavy away from your ears.
You're going to start to feel for length from the earlobes to the tips of your shoulders.
Softly let your eyes land closed.
And we're going to come into the first part of your practice.
Exercise one is about releasing some of the residual tension that some of us tend to hold in the body.
You bring your mind's eye to the sides and back of your neck.
You'll see if you can breathe a little bit softer so that you can release that tension.
Let the eyes be nice and heavy in their sockets.
You'll imagine that the space between your eyebrows is nice and smooth.
You'll allow the tongue to release from the roof of your mouth and fill the lower soft palate.
You might notice that that starts to relax the jaw.
You'll start to take a gentle scan to see if there's anywhere else that there are obvious signs of tension.
Maybe the scalp,
The belly,
The fingers or the palms of your hands.
You'll just do your best here to make these places be a little bit more at ease.
Now from this place of focused relaxation,
We're going to take three deep breaths.
Breathing in through your nostrils.
Breathing out through your nostrils.
Breathing in.
Breathing out.
Last one like this.
Breathing in.
And breathing out.
Our next exercise is to start to add a little bit more softness.
One of the ways that we can do this is by softening the breath.
We're going to do this by using visualization techniques.
You're going to imagine that there's a candle or a flame in front of your nostrils.
You don't want to disturb or blow out that flame.
As you start to do this,
It adds a little bit more depth and softness.
You're going to try here for a few rounds to picture that flame in your mind's eye.
Try for three rounds and see how you go.
Then at the end of your next exhale,
You'll come back to your natural breath.
Keeping just a little bit of length and a little bit of the softness that you just created.
We're going to add a little bit of a body scan to this.
So first,
You're going to bring the attention to the crown of your head.
You'll imagine relaxation melting over your scalp and forehead.
The space between your eyebrows,
Along the temples to your cheekbones.
Down the jaw,
The sides of the neck.
Tops of the shoulders,
Chest.
Along the arm bones to the elbows,
Forearms,
Tips of the fingers.
You bring your attention to the belly,
The back.
Sitting bones and the tops of the legs.
Feel the bottom parts of your legs are at ease.
Ankles,
Tops of feet,
Soles of the feet.
And each of your toes.
Take a deep breath in through your nostrils.
And softly release.
From here,
We're going to move on to exercise three.
So what I want you to feel in this one is that we're reversing the effects of sitting all day.
So many times we sit and gravity starts to take the shoulders forward and rounded and a little bit of collapsing tends to happen through the chest.
So we're just going to start to create a little bit more space there.
You'll come back into that sense that the back of your body is strong,
That your chest is open.
We're going to use the breath to start to create a little bit more length in the spine.
So on the inhale,
You're going to press into the sitting bones.
Feel that the base of your spine starts to lengthen.
All the way up to the crown of the head.
And on the exhale,
You'll actively relax the shoulders.
You'll draw them down away from the ears.
And feel that sense of openness across the front of the shoulders.
We're going to take a couple more focused breaths like that.
So the inhale creates a bit more length as you press yourself up tall.
And the exhale keeps that sense of ease as the shoulders drop and the jaw relaxes.
I'll take two more breaths like that.
Breathing in,
Thinking length.
Breathing out,
Relaxation.
Last one,
Finding space on the inhale.
Sensing ease on your exhale.
You'll keep this and we're going to take a deep breath together.
And release.
So what you'll start to notice is the way that the breath feels now.
Getting a sense for an expansion across the front of your body.
And noticing the softness,
The heaviness of your shoulders.
You'll bring the focus to how you're sitting.
You'll notice the length that you started to create in your spine and how much easier it feels to breathe when you're sitting tall like this.
So you're going to start to shift your awareness to your mind now.
What I want you to get a sense of is the state of it.
You'll feel for if the thoughts feel fast or slow.
If it feels like it's busy or if there's a little bit more calmness perhaps than when you started.
These breathing practices can have such a profound impact on our thoughts and they allow us to start to recover from the day.
Sometimes you might need to do this practice a number of times to be able to really feel the benefits and that's completely normal and okay.
Thank you so much for sitting with me and enjoy that sense of peace that you've started to create today in your practice.
I look forward to seeing you back here soon for your next session.
