A Breathing Series: Gentle Movement To Free Your Breath

Breathing is so much more than simply the breath. How you breathe is impacted by your posture and in turn, your posture is impacted by your breath. In this practice, we will explore a simple breath and movement exercise (which can be done seated) followed by a visualization to bring about a sense of greater ease with your breath. This practice is taken from day 7 of my course here on Insight Timer 'The Breath - Heal Your Life From The Inside Out'.

Transcript

In this practice,

We'll be combining gentle movement with visualization.

So sitting comfortably either on a chair or on the floor,

And take a couple of deep cleansing breaths.

Place your hands on your knees or thighs.

And you're going to begin by visualizing your pelvic bowl.

And as you visualize this bowl of your pelvis,

Start to tilt your pelvic bowl forwards.

So you could perhaps even imagine it was full of water and you're tipping that water out to the front of you.

Now move it in the opposite way.

So you tilt your pelvic bowl backwards.

Continue this movement of your pelvis.

And as you do this tilting backwards and forwards of the pelvis,

Start to bring your whole spine into this movement.

So as you tilt your pelvic bowl forwards,

Your spine lengthens,

Your shoulders open up and draw back and your chin lifts gently towards the sky.

And as you tilt your pelvis back,

You round through your spine,

Your shoulders and your chin tucks in.

Now continue with this pattern in your body,

This movement in your body.

And now begin to add the breath.

Sink your breath to the movement.

As your pelvis tilts forward and your spine lengthens,

Breathe in.

And as you tilt the pelvis back,

Your spine rounds,

You breathe out.

Continue moving and breathing in this way.

So if you're familiar with yoga,

This is like a seated version of cat-cow.

Feel this movement and the breath creating more openness through the body and more easefulness of movement.

And finally now come to stillness.

Now staying with your breath.

Staying with your breath.

As you breathe in,

I want you to visualize,

Sense or see a white healing light starting at the base of your spine,

Moving all the way up your spine to the crown of your head.

And as you breathe out,

Visualize,

Feel or sense this white healing light traveling all the way down your spine,

Back down to your tailbone.

Continue playing with this light traveling up on an in-breath and down on an out-breath.

Noticing if there's any areas of the spine that you skip as you send this light up and down.

Can you stay connected to the whole spine as you stay present to this visualization?

Stay with this visualization for a few more rounds of breath.

Finally,

Release this visualization and simply observe.

Observing the breath,

Observing the body.