I want to offer you a really accessible reset for your energy body when you’re feeling anxious, when you’re feeling depressed, when you’re feeling off balanced from the core of your being in any way. This simple exercise will bring you back home to yourself in the most useful, beautiful way.
Before I share that with you, I want to share with you my new book, Align: Living and Loving from the True Self. Align offers a comprehensive map of how to come back home to the core of your being, and how to live and love from this deeply sacred place within you. I also have these new self-guided Alignment Cards. There are 48 cards in a deck, and each card has a wisdom teaching and a sentence stem to support you in living and loving from your true self.
Aside from being a psychotherapist and a teacher and an author, one of the foundational practices that I have grown up with, because I learned it from my mom and engage in as part of my most important integral self-care practice, is the practice of breathwork. My mom was a breathworker, and she taught people how to become breathworkers, and I’ve since been trained as a breathworker. To me, the breath is so sacred in its ability to pull in new energy, new life, and to clear out old energy and old emotions. It also is the only part of our autonomic nervous system that we have conscious control over, and so it is essential in regulating our nervous system.
The practice that I’m going to teach you today is called 20 Connected Breaths. When we do 20 Connected Breaths, we are going to do 3 just nice long breaths when we begin, and then we’re going to do 4 short breaths and one long, and we’re going to repeat that 5 times. So that comes to 20.
Before we do that, I just want to say that there’s two things that make a connected breath, and one is that we breathe in and out the nose. We don’t switch between the nose and the mouth. If the nose is plugged, we can breathe in and out the mouth. But again, we don’t switch from the mouth to the nose. So part of what makes it connected is that it comes in and out of the same part of us.
The other part that makes it connected, is that we don’t stop at the top or the bottom. The breath is circular, and so it’s connected. Okay, so those are the two things to remember. As we do this, I’m going to count your breath for you. If you would like to join me:
To begin, just start by taking 3 breaths in and out your nose
Two more nice long breaths in and out your nose
Last one
And now, beginning with the short connected breaths
4 short breaths in and out the nose
Don’t stop at the top or the bottom, breathe in like you’re breathing in a flower, like you’re smelling a flower
One long, 4 short
One long, 4 short
One long, 4 short
One long, last round, 4 short
One long
And now just breathe normally, and just notice how you feel. Do you feel tingly? If you do, that’s vitality, that’s energy. Do you feel more aligned? If you do, just keep making more space for that energy to move through you. Hmm! Just a couple more breaths here, just feeling into your body.
I want to remind you that you can do this anytime except for when you’re driving. It’s best when you’re sitting down, when you need a quick reset, breathing in and out the nose, breathing in new life, new energy, and moving out old emotions and old energy and coming back home to yourself.
Blessings to you on your journey.