Gratitude Breathing For Immediate Relief

This session introduces the practice of 'Gratitude Breathing' - a simple way to respond to overwhelm, stress, and triggers. Begin by taking a breath, sigh, then wait and allow your body to breathe in. During this process, actively relax your body and foster feelings of gratitude to a person, pet, or plant in your life.
Repeat this process until the distress passes.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the session, I invite you to lie down or take a seat and get yourself comfortable. You can close down the eyes if you wish and just begin slowing down the breath. Today we're going to be doing a simple breath work practice that I'm going to call gratitude breathing. It's really quite simple and it's something that you can do both as a formal practice or in the moment in your day to day life in response to stress, Overwhelm and dysregulation. The first part is to do an inaudible sigh, Just breathing out as if you were going to make the sound ahhh. You can choose to do it vocally or internally but we're just sighing, So the first part is an out breath and then we wait, We wait at the bottom of the breath and allow our body to breathe in. So you do an out breath, Sigh and with your mouth closed just allow the body to breathe in slowly through the nose, Ahhh. And as your body is breathing in we relax the body, Actively relaxing the neck, Dropping the shoulders, The jaw, Releasing the belly and legs and any other tension we're holding on to. So the first step is an out breath, Sigh, Ahh, Allowing the body to breathe in slowly and actively relaxing the shoulders, The jaw, The belly, The neck, The legs, Actively relaxing the entire body. And the final step of this gratitude breath practice is to connect to the feelings of gratitude and love you have for a person, Pet or plant that is near you, Just taking a moment to feel the gratitude you have for a person, A pet or a plant in your life, Just feel the love for them, Feel the gratitude for them being in your life, Connect to the energy that they offer. And that's it, That's the practice, The out breath, Sigh, The allowing of the body to breathe in through the nose slowly, The active relaxing of the muscles in the body and the connection and gratitude to a person, Pet or plant in your life, And you just repeat the process until those feelings pass, Until it shifts. So let's try it together now, Breathing out and sighing, Ahh, Allowing the body to breathe in, And as you're allowing the body to breathe in, Just relaxing the muscles and feeling that gratitude and love and compassion to a person, Pet or plant in your life. Let's sit together now for one minute and repeat that process together, Ahh, So well done, I invite you to return back to this session whenever you like, And to use this gratitude breath practice either as a formal meditation practice or in response to things arising in your environment, And I'll see you in the next session, Thank you.

Reviews

Helpful to calm my thoughts and reconnect to my heart