Reconnecting with your Breathing for Relaxation | Day 5 | The Presence Sessions

Can your breath truly transform your meditation experience? Today, we explore the underrated yet profound art of breathing well. Learn subtle but significant techniques to notice and improve your breathing patterns, helping you transition from shallow chest breaths to full-bodied breaths that reach down to your pelvic cavity.

 ( This episode was formerly on the the Pure Light Project Podcast ) 

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:04

come over to purelightbookshoppe. com and check out my newest book, the Calm Way. And now let's get into today's presence session. So I want to give you a few tips today on breathing well during your meditations and your practice sessions, your presence practice. Breathing well sometimes we take it for granted, especially as we go along, and then maybe we get snuffy or whatever and we can't, we can't really breathe well. Maybe we're going through something in our body or the environment is kind of stuffy and airless and we feel distracted. And so, really knowing how to breathe well, from my experience and I went through a lot of years of trying to bring this down to a place, to the most basic, basic things, so that I could always breathe well and what showed up for me is that I can work with the entirety of my body and work by bringing the breath which normally kind of stops up in our chest. If you're, say, preoccupied or living the average life, most people are breathing from right up top, right up in their chest, and they can't even get it down into the diaphragm right under the sort of under the breasts or the breast bone, under the rib cage, much less deeper down into their belly, much less deeper down into their pelvic cavity, and so one of the techniques that I've evolved over the last few years is what I call root breathing or sacral breathing, depending on how far down you go, and I'm going to be sharing a course on that, probably in a few weeks, but for now, what I want to do is give you an experience of that, and we're going to start.

Speaker 1: 2:19

Today's practice is really going to be working with the breath, and so, right now, go ahead and take a breath. Simple as that. Take a breath, inhale and exhale and notice where it, where the breath is in your body. Is it way up high? Is it even as high as in the throat, or just your mouth and nasal cavity? Keep breathing. Keep breathing and notice, and not to get hung up on it we're not even taking deep breaths Just your normal average breath. Okay, deep breaths, just your normal average breath. Okay, now I'd like you if you're sitting, I'd like you to stand, and if you're standing, I'd like you to sit, and so we're gonna play with the difference here, and and so, again, we're gonna just breathe for a minute, noticing where the breath is. You might also put your hand on the part of your body that you most feel the breath to kind of help you identify. So let's just keep breathing. Identify, so let's just keep breathing. Notice what your shoulders are doing, notice the expansion of your belly, notice any other parts of your body.

Speaker 1: 4:18

Okay, and now, as we move into bringing the breath deeper down into us, top of our head, down to our feet, and with your awareness, just bring your awareness all the way through your body as you're breathing, very naturally, noticing where there's tension in your body, anywhere. We're not going to stop at those places, places, it's just a quick little noticing that there's tension or tightness or soreness or dullness in those places. So go ahead and and scan your body now, scanning the top of the crown down into the nose region, bringing your awareness down into your mouth and jawline. Scanning down into the top of your throat, down to the base of your shoulders and the top of your chest. Scanning both arms, noticing if there's tension in the forearms, upper arms, hands, fingers, just notice, okay, and we bring the awareness back to the torso. So the chest, the upper chest, side walls of the body, kind of the sides of your ribs, down into the upper abdomen, lower abdomen, okay, also on your back, your lumbar region, your low back, bringing your awareness further down into the hips and pelvis. Awareness further down into the hips and pelvis down into the legs. Yeah, your thighs, oh, let's not forget the hip flexors. Sort the thighs, the knees, front and back, the shins, calves, down to your ankles, noticing if there's any tightness, tension, down to the bottoms of your feet, the tips of your toes. Alright, and now, anywhere that there's tension, put your hand on it. If you can reach, or psychically, mentally, put your hand on it and just give it a little bit of a rub, a pat, and invite it to soften. We'll leave it there for right now.

Speaker 1: 7:25

Okay, and so Now, as we work with the breath, we're going to work with bringing the breath further down into the belly and you may be able to breathe really easily and naturally. This is still very good practice to consciously be aware of your breath and how it's working in your body and your connection, because it's never just the breath going into the body through the lungs. The whole body is breathing with us and it's actually quite phenomenal to start to really make that connection, because when you feel like you can't get a breath, you learn how to bring the breath into different areas, reroute it effectively or route it better. Okay, so we take a breath and let's take one deep breath together. Okay, when you're breathing, is your mouth open or closed? Are you breathing through the nose or through the mouth, or both? I'm going to invite you into an experience right now.

Speaker 1: 8:37

To breathe First, we're going to play with the tip of the tongue on the roof of the mouth, your lips slightly parted, so the tip of the tongue behind the front top teeth, lips slightly parted and flare your nostrils just ever so slightly as you breathe in, as you inhale, so breathe in and exhale through the mouth, so you're inhaling and exhaling through both the nostrils and the mouth, as you are able and wherever the natural breath is in your body, if it's way up in your chest, notice if there's a difference between that and how you normally breathe. Again, what I'm showing you. There are no right or wrong ways. I'm going to relieve you of that pressure right now. We're just playing. We're just playing with the breath, that's it, and finding new ways to relax ourselves so that it's easy. This isn't meant to be difficult. It's actually meant to be a beautiful place to rest in that basic ground of reality, that basic nature and to do it with ease as a human being walking on this planet.

Speaker 1: 10:10

So now we're going to bring the breath a little lower. Wherever you find the breath in your body, let's make the intention to take it one level lower in your body and see what that feels like. Okay, so here we go. Take a breath in Again. Lips slightly parted, tongue on the top of the mouth, nostrils breathing in, maybe flare them a little to help the breath go in deeper. Okay, how did that feel? Take another breath and try it again. What parts of you expand and contract? Is it just forward, like on the front of you, that you feel the expansion and contraction, or is it on the sides and the back of you? Okay, and now we're going to bring it a little bit lower. So if you're breathing in your diaphragm region, let's bring it down into that lower belly, maybe belly button region and just below. If you're breathing all the way down there, breathe into your kidneys, low back, lumbar, top of hip area. How do you do that? Put your hands on your body if it helps you to play with it.

Speaker 1: 12:02

I know that I say these things really casually and a lot of people I talk with don't really understand what I'm explaining until they start putting their hands on their body, and sometimes not even then. It takes a while to develop a new connection in our body. So, all right, so let's breathe in again, breathing one region lower than where you were the last time. Okay, now, what came up for you? You might want to continue to play with this after this session. You might want to grab a notebook, make some notes, even some diagrams, anything that really supports you. You know what that is.

Speaker 1: 13:13

So now, as I said earlier, I asked you to switch. If you were standing, go ahead and sit. If you were sitting, go ahead and stand. Let's do that again, let's switch. So, however you're located in your body right now, located in your body right now, go ahead and switch your position and let's do this again. And the reason is to really start to notice the differences in how we breathe depending on if we're seated or if we're standing, because there's different pressures in the body. It can be very easy sometimes just to breathe well one way or the other. A lot of it has to do with our overall posture and the openness of our frame and our muscles, where we might have spinal, say, issues or just a variety of things, a variety of things pertaining to our physicality. So go ahead, make that switch, thank you, and let's breathe again Again, hands on your body.

Speaker 1: 14:25

If it helps you, even if you don't think it will go ahead, you might try and play with it. I like to do it with my hands on the front and then my hands on the side and then my hands on the back of me, and so right now let's go ahead and and just breathe into the chest, really shallow breath. That's not easy sometimes when you're used to breathing down lower. It's also okay. You know the air is going to go where the air is going to go, so don't strain over this. Okay, now let's put the hands down on the diaphragm, so under the breasts or the chest, right at the edge of the ribs. Breathe into that on the front.

Speaker 1: 15:30

Breathe into that on the front, noticing on the inhale and the exhale what's happening. And then hands on the side. If you're able, if you're somebody with good flexibility or long enough arms, you might even crisscross and hug yourself, but generally easier for this practice if you can just put that right hand on right side, left hand on left side and now, if you can reach to the back, around that same area, around the diaphragm, sort of mid-back. Okay, and now let's bring it lower and since your hands are on the back, go ahead and keep them in that lumbar region, kidneys, lumbar. Breathe into that.

Speaker 1: 16:41

What do you notice? Bring your hands to the side, to the tops of your hips. For women this is going to be much lower. For men it's going to actually be quite high. The ridge of the hips goes up quite high in the body compared to the female body. But bring it to the hip area and breathe in and out and you're not going to probably notice like huge amounts of movement. It's more just to bring an awareness to it. And now let's put the hands on the front of the lower belly again, sort of belly button, navel area and right below and breathe in and out.

Speaker 1: 17:50

Beautiful, it's pretty easy to feel our bodies moving in our belly, like when we're breathing. It's probably the one thing most of us have learned. You know, when you're inhaling, the belly expands. When you're exhaling, the belly contracts or collapses. Now, for years I breathed. If I was able to get a breath down there, I was so obsessed with it that I breathed backwards still. So it was quite an undoing for me learning how to breathe well. So this is what I'm going to conclude with today. Thank you so much for being here, for showing up for yourself. I hope that this kind of practice is inspiring to you, and of practice is inspiring to you and otherwise. Just have such a beautiful day. Come over to purelightbookshoppe. com and check out my newest book, the Calm Way 365 day journey out of the weeds and into the wilds of true inner freedom.