Guided Meditation

"Finding Stillness in Daily Life"

Today's practice focuses on extending the pauses between our inhalation to exhalation AND our exhalation to inhalation. Sometimes when we manipulate our breath, we unconsciously increase tension in our body. We will explore different tongue and mouth positions to alleviate tension in the upper body and move our breath so each inhalation, pause, exhalation and pause last the same amount of time. If it is helpful, you can use the visual of moving the breath around a square shape, with each leg of the square representing each part of your breath cycle, taking 3-5 seconds to move between each corner of the square. Be kind to yourself as this is a practice. Be curious: you may initially make more of a rectangular shape or other abstract art as you learn to hold the pauses with less effort or resistance.

Guided Meditation

“Autonomic Nervous System Reset”

Our autonomic nervous system (ANS) includes our fight/flight system (sympathetic) and rest/digest/chill system (parasympathetic). The sympathetic nervous system revs up when we need to flee or fight; however, it can also repeated rev up when we feel stressed, anxious and our thoughts are living in the future. The parasympathetic nervous system will try to rev up and match the demands on the nervous system, but often can't help us reset when our autonomic nervous system is in overdrive.

When we manipulate our breath, especially when we extend our exhalation or hold following an exhalation, we are able to access our parasympathetic nervous system 'reset button' and help downregulate the entire ANS. Use this practice as a rest/digest/chill reset. This practice will focus on a four-count inhalation, followed by an eight-count exhalation. It is meant to be a practice; you may need to play with the depth of your inhalation to fit it into four-counts and the depth of your exhalation. See how you feel after a few cycles of this breath practice.