Vagus Nerve Breathing To Reduce Anxiety & Stress

In this short practice, you are invited to make a 'voo' sound as you consciously breathe, followed by some gentle self-massage. A combination of 'voo' breathing with self-massage assists with minimizing the impacts of anxiety & tonifies the vagus nerve. If you are curious to learn more about how you can use the breath as a powerful tool towards self-healing, I have 2 courses here on Insight Timer 'The Breath - Heal Your Life From The Inside Out' and 'The Breath - Your Inner Pharmacy'

Transcript

This practice is a beautiful practice for regulating the nervous system and toning what's called the vagus nerve,

Which is a really important nerve in our body that is connected to the nervous system.

This is a super simple practice you can do almost anywhere.

It's called zhu breath.

And what we're going to do is simply take a breath in and on the exhale make the sound zhu.

This sound needs to be deep,

Slow and resonant.

So it'll sound something like this.

So a breath in and then zhu.

So let's just begin this together.

Take a deep breath in and as you exhale make the sound zhu.

Again deep breath in and zhu.

Let's do two more.

Zhu.

One more.

Zhu.

Beautiful.

So just sitting in the resonance of that sound and just taking your hands now to your neck just beneath your jawline and just start to gently run your fingers from the jawline just down the neck.

Just massaging the neck.

This is where the vagus nerve lives.

Just from the side of the neck around beneath the ear just below the jawline.

And in whatever way feels good to massage maybe it's with your fingers.

Maybe it's gently pinching at the muscles.

Maybe you're using the palms of your hands.

Just massaging beneath the ears,

Down the neck,

Beneath the hinges of the jaw and down the neck.

So both tonifying the vagus nerve through the sound of zhu and then just relaxing massaging that whole area.

Just a few more seconds massaging the neck area.

Beautiful and then just release your hands down.

Let's take a deep breath in and let's do one final zhu.

And then breath in,

Breath out.

Just notice how you feel.

Reviews

That was an incredible experience, 🙏

Found myself pinching my eyebrows when I breathed out saying vuuuu

A sweet, simple practice you can take with you anywhere. Thank you 🙏

This was really wonderful. I have never done anything like this before. It was very beautiful. Thank you.

Hello beautiful 🎀🎄🎀🎄🎀Thank you so much for the wonderfully practice 🎀🎀it gives me so much smiles and sweetness 🗺️have a blessed day 🕉️Namaste