How To Practice 3-Part Breathing

Struggling to focus in your meditation practice? Then try this 3-part breathing technique before you settle into meditating. By encouraging a slower, deeper breath which incorporates the full length of the lungs we can experience more focus in our next activity.
This video teaches the technique, please check out my other video guiding you through a practice.

Transcript

So today I'm going to teach you how to do the full three part breath. So find a comfortable seat to sit in. And I'm going to start by taking a couple of slow deep breaths just to steady us before we begin. So take a deep breath in. And exhale all the air out. This just helps to get you focused and ready to start. To begin with, We'll place our hand on our stomachs round about your navel. You want to feel as you breathe in, You're pushing your stomach out into your hands and as you exhale, You're drawing it back. This is a belly breath, You're breathing deeply into the abdomen, Which helps to activate your relaxed response. It starts you off. Down the road to being calm and smooth. So doing this in itself is perfect. So breathing into the stomach, Expand it out into your hand and then drawing the navel back towards the spine. So we do that for five, Six breaths, A couple of minutes, And then we take the hands to the ribs. So breathing's three-dimensional, Out, Front and back, And out to the sides. So again, We're breathing in to expand the stomach, But we're also taking a deeper breath to expand the ribs out to the side. So as you do that you're breathing in fully deeper into your lungs and as you exhale letting your ribs relax and letting the navel go back to the spine. So you inhale again to the stomach. To the right. And then exhale the ribs and the navel back. And again, Another five, Six breaths, Another couple of minutes there. And then the third round, Take your hands to your collarbones. So you're breathing again into the stomach first. Ribs out to the side and taking a bit more air into the top of your lungs up here. Exhaling to relax the collarbones, Relax the ribs back and the navel back to the spine. So inhale again, Stomach. Collarbones and exhaling, Relaxing the collarbones, Ribs and stomach. That's how to do the three-part breath. I've got a whole other video where I talk you through it and we do a guided version so go check that out.