Calm Anxiety Fast: Cupcake Breath

This is a quick but powerful breathing technique to calm stress and anxiety. This is particularly helpful for anyone who finds counting their breath difficult and instead would prefer a visual to help them. This will ground your body, slow a racing mind, and regulate your nervous system in minutes.

Transcript

Okay, So welcome into another body work practice. Practice to get you into your body, To get you working on the somatic side of this. So what I'm going to teach you today is sometimes called the cupcake breath or candle breath or blowing the candles out on a birthday cake breath. I like to basically just call it cupcake breath because I think that's quite a nice way of seeing it. And what we're basically going to be doing is we're going to be using the breath to of course soothe our nervous system and to help us to feel nice and calm but we're going to be doing it with a visual. So this could be really really helpful if you are quite a visual person you know if you are somebody who sort of needs the visual of something to actually feel like they feel like they're actually doing you know they know what they're doing and they can see it. And I think also with this cupcake breath I find it's really helpful when you're feeling really anxious in the way that your mind can't really think that clearly. You know when anxiety obviously goes up the more it goes up the less you can feel clearly in your mind. So that's when I find really trying to count your breath or do certain things can for some people not everyone but for some people can feel really difficult. So this is where we might bring the visual in. So what we're going to do is we're literally going to imagine that you've got a little cupcake in front of you and it's got candle in it so maybe it's your birthday whatever there's a candle in this and and I've got little like candle holders so that you can imagine it. It doesn't have to be a cupcake maybe it literally is just a candle that you'll visualize it in front of you. And then what you're going to do is you're going to visualize blowing the candle out. So we've got candle on here and we're going to imagine just taking a deep breath in and then we're gently just blowing that candle out. Okay and again I'm going to breathe deeply in and then gently blowing that candle out. Now you don't need this pop in front of you this is just so you can almost imagine what I'm saying but I'm going to put this down so you can just now visualize this instead. So let's close the eyes let's imagine there's a candle like this in front of you maybe it's on a cupcake maybe it's on a cake maybe it's just a candle and we're going to take a deep nourishing breath in blowing that candle out breathing in getting through the nose breathing in getting through the nose when you're ready blowing that candle all the way out through the mouth one more time taking a deep breath in through the nose when you're ready blowing that candle out now already you will probably start to feel a difference in your body it is hard to almost make that motion like that without feeling karma and I think when we don't know necessarily how to breathe deeply or maybe we're just not used to it again like I say this visual can be such a beautiful thing to help you so let's do it a couple more times and again I want you to really feel into it feel into that difference it makes in the body so you might want to move your hands around I've got mine placed on my lap or you can even lay down and do this it doesn't matter you're going to close the eyes we're going to breathe in through the nose and then blowing that candle out through the mouth again breathing in deep breath deep nourishing breath in through the nose and then see how long you can elongate this breath all the way out through the mouth blowing that candle out see if you can really draw this out and we can play around with almost whether we want to kind of fully blow that candle out that's going to be a bit more of a forceful breath out or you might even want to play around with what it's like to just kind of flicker flicker the candle so this is when you start to realize actually I really can like maneuver my breath in the way that feels good to me and I really can move it down in my body so just feel what it's like this time to almost imagining that you're not fully blowing that candle out but you're just flickering it so breathing in again through the nose and likewise blow that candle out just imagine it flickering do you see how that's a much softer breath only you're going to know what you need I tend to find like fully blowing it out really helps more but depending on what place you're in depending on what you want to practice you might just want to practice that flickering because it's a softer breath see what that feels like in your own you know personal body and what you're personally needing all right come back to this whenever you need join this in with other practices and you'll probably hear me at times actually do this in over in you know the audios the meditations so the more you can actually visually see what I'm doing I feel like that's going to help you more when you're doing it and you're just listening to me doing it all right I'll see you in another practice