How has your breathing felt lately? Has it been shallow, short and quick? Or deep, long, and relaxed?
In a world fixated on quick fixes, few people recognize the power and great change that comes from simply deepening our breath. We will be exploring many breathing techniques over the course of the next few months, but let’s start with simply noticing our breath.
Close your eyes, and simply notice for a minute. When the minute is up, take a break and try again, this time placing a hand no your belly and breathing fully and deeply into your belly. Notice how you feel after intentionally taking some deep breaths.
Remember the phrase “fight or flight, rest and digest”? Your body does too. In fact its constantly in a state of either one. Our autonomic nervous system holds our sympathetic (fight or flight) and parasympathetic (rest and digest) responses. If we are constantly on edge, worried about our next test score, or getting to work on time, getting aggravated by traffic and the world not operating “our way” we will find ourselves breathing very shallow and taking short breaths. This is signaling to our body we are in distress.
If we are relaxed, understand there are difficulties such as traffic, understand we are doing our best, accept reality for what it is, and take deep meaningful breaths, we are signaling to our body that we are safe.
So if you’re that person on the edge of their seat, constantly being hit by stress how do begin to ease your bodying slow a racing mind? Start with the breath. Simply start with meaningful deep belly breaths. The rest will follow, and I look forward to sharing more tools to align your body and mind with a more gentle approach to daily living.