Linking Movement & Breath For Managing Anxiety

This practice outlines three different techniques to link the gentle movement of the arms and breath.

As with any meditation or meditative practice that can leave us in a relaxed state, please remember to exercise the necessary caution and steps to ensure safety and health, such as avoiding driving or operating heavy machinery during or immediately following the practice.

Transcript

Hello and welcome.

In today's practice,

I'm going to be teaching you three different techniques in linking breath and movement.

Now there's a few reasons why we do this.

One of which is linking breath and movement can really help us slow down our breathing and it can help us breathe a bit more steadily than we would otherwise.

This is really helpful in regulating our central nervous system and it actually invokes what's called the parasympathetic nervous system and we can think of that as parachute,

Right,

As coming down,

As calming down.

The central nervous system is essentially responsible for us feeling anxiety and it's a really important system in our bodies.

All mammals have it and we don't want it to go away but in today's world,

A lot of the time our central nervous system is sort of firing unnecessarily,

Right,

So we call that it being dysregulated.

Another reason why we link breath and movement is that it can really help us develop more of an awareness of our breath.

So some of us throughout the day,

As we engage in different tasks or different movements,

We can actually be holding our breath and not even really be aware of it.

So intentionally linking the two things ultimately helps us be a bit more aware of our breathing throughout the day.

So linking our breath and movement is a mindfulness activity,

Right,

So concentrating on sinking the flow of movement with the flow of breath is something that we focus on,

Right.

It's very helpful for managing anxiety.

It's very helpful for when we have a lot of spinning thoughts that often come with anxiety.

So again today I'm going to be teaching you three different techniques that incorporate gentle movement and breath and there's many ways to do this but in today's practice we're going to be mostly focusing on just moving our arms with our breath.

So first I'd like to invite you to find a comfortable seat either in a chair or on a couch or sitting right down on the ground.

If you're sitting in a chair or on a couch I would recommend really pressing both feet into the ground gently underneath you to really help connect you to the earth and if you're sitting directly on the ground you can sit with your legs out in front of you or criss-cross whatever is more comfortable for you.

Once you find yourself in that space first what we're going to do is just start noticing our breath.

So we're not going to do anything right now to change it or to shift it at all we're just checking in just noticing it.

Notice the length of your inhales and your exhales.

Do you notice if you're breathing a bit more shallow right now than you might otherwise be?

And if you were to check in with your body with your level of anxiety in this moment say putting it on a 0 to 10 scale 0 meaning I have no anxiety 10 meaning I have the highest anxiety I can imagine where would you say you are right now?

Just kind of check in see what that number feels like at this moment and what we'll do is we'll check in again at the end of our practice here and see if that number has changed at all.

So now we'll start doing our techniques and we'll do each of these techniques five times.

So the first technique we'll do is called superhero arms and what we're going to do is on our inhale we're going to bring both of our arms up in front of us straight out ahead kind of like how a superhero may look when they're flying.

So your arms straight out ahead shoulder height your palms facing down and the exhale we're going to release our arms back down to our side or to the ground next to us.

So let's practice this here together our inhale will be three seconds and our exhale will be three seconds.

So let's begin inhale in one two three as we have our arms out in front of us and then go ahead and float them back down on your exhale one two three.

Beautiful let's do it again inhale one two three arms out in front of you exhale float your arms down one two three.

And let's do this three more times together inhale in one two three and float your hands down one two three.

Two more times inhale in one two three exhale one two three.

One last time inhale in one two three exhale float those hands down one two three.

Excellent.

Our next technique is called cactus arms.

So in the same position you're in we're going to bring our arms out to the side straight out shoulder height and we're going to bend our elbows up to a 90 degree angle our palms facing forward so we sort of look like we're in a cactus shape or a goalpost shape.

And we're going to link our movement here with our breath by folding our arms in together for our inhale so as we fold our arms in our elbows forearms and palms are going to touch and then we exhale and release them back out to that cactus or goalpost position.

So again we're going to do this together we'll practice it five times and same amount of seconds so three seconds for our inhale and then three seconds for our exhale.

So let's go ahead and try the second technique our cactus arms.

Your arms are again out to your side shoulder height elbows at a 90 degree angle like a cactus or a goalpost your palms facing forward.

So we're going to inhale in one two three and now our arms forearms elbows and hands are pressing together.

We're going to exhale for three one two three.

Very nice let's do it again inhale one two three arms are together and exhale one two three.

Three more times inhale in one two three and exhale out one two three.

Inhale in one two three exhale one two three.

One more time inhale in one two three and exhale one two three.

You can gently release your arms back down.

Also I want to mention that when we're doing these movements sometimes we can feel the muscles in our arms waking up a bit so we might feel some heat in our muscles and that's okay so long as it's not hurting right if there's any pain or anything like that we don't want to do this exercise or any exercise right that's causing us pain okay if at any point on any day you're feeling any kind of pain with this exercise or any exercise go ahead and keep your arms steady or in a comfortable position and you can still do the breathing piece here.

Okay so let's go ahead and move to our third technique which is overhead arms.

So with this exercise what we're going to do is have our arms out to our sides relax down next to us and our inhale will consist of lifting our arms upward over our heads with our palms coming to touch so kind of like what you might imagine a ballerina looks like putting their arms over their heads and then we release our arms back down to our sides on our exhale.

So this one is going to be a little bit longer of an inhale and an exhale we're going to do five seconds of inhale and five seconds of exhale.

So let's begin together inhale in one two three four five and now our arms are over our heads our palms touching together we're going to exhale one two three four five gently releasing our arms back down.

Great we'll do this four more times inhale in one two three four five palms touch and gently release one two three four five really concentrating on the exhale when we're bringing our arms down.

Three more times inhale in one two three four five and exhale release one two three four five inhale in one two three four five and exhale release one two three four five.

One more together inhale in one two three four five and release exhale one two three four five.

Great work.

So now we're going to take a few moments here to just return back to our natural breathing.

Not doing anything to change the speed of our breath.

And let's take a moment to again check in with our bodies.

If we were to look at that anxiety scale again from zero to ten zero being no anxiety at all or ten being the most anxiety we can imagine where would you say you are now?

And again we're just checking in here we're just gathering information there's no right or wrong we're just noticing which techniques work best for each of us individually.

So I encourage you to practice these techniques as feels right in your body and you can do all three together kind of like what we did today in our practice or do the one or ones that you enjoyed the most.

Over time as with anything right the more we practice something the more we're going to feel the effects from it.

Please feel free to write in the comments which of these techniques you like the most and which ones tend to work for you the best.

Thanks very much.

Reviews

l’ve experienced some physical sensations of anxiety a lot during the day. After the session l rate 2 for my anxiet level out of 10, thanks!