Take a moment, right now.
Breathe, count two, three, four.
Place a hand on your lower abdomen, feel how it raises and fall with your breath.
Breathe, count two, three, four.
Move your concentration to your nose and mouth, feel how the air moves past your lips or nostrils, it flows in and out.
Breathe, count two, three, four.
While keeping contact with your phycial breath and how air flows, notice your feet on the ground, stable and strong.
Relax the muscles around your eyes, make your eyes "soft", just breathe and read, gently.
Nowadays we see a lot of promotion around breathing exercises, yoga, meditation and mindfulness. For some people they interpret this as ‘spiritual’ practices. Other people like me practice all of these in a purely neutral way. All of these practices can be experienced from a physical, mental and emotional perspective without believing anything if you do not want to. The reason I speak about this, is that the effect that mindfulness and breathing, when practised over the long term will have a positive effect on your overall health. Of course you can also practice any of these methods in a more subjective way, that is fine as well. Our focus here is mental and emotional well-being.
The foundation
Keywords here are focus, concentration and time. By practising breathing exercises you will experience the way time passes and what it means to you, your thinking and your whole awareness of your Self more consciously. This has the ability to allow you, give yourself permission to feel your whole self. By which I mean you use your concentration and senses to experience your body consciously.
When you have made the choice to work on your mental health feeling your whole body, making contact with your own mind, intelligence, learning to observe how thoughts flow as they arise and disappear and dive deeper into experiences of how feelings and sensations are created in your mind is the foundation. A bride to your own self, your well-being. There is a path of mental, physical exercise here which will function as a real life support for every difficult day, hard conversation, every time you need to be assertive and set your boundaries.
Breathing will play a role in finding your self, your strength and your experience of mental and emotional freedom.
Exercises
When you join me for coaching and we have made a plan together for your goals, there is a good chance that breathing exercises as well as other mindfulness or physical exercises will be part of this plan. What does that mean practically?
- Some minutes of breathing square breathing, also called box breathing
- Relaxation exercises to explore your inner world of thoughts, feelings and bodily experiences.
- Games of concentration, thought and decision making like chess, checkers and other alternatives
- Conscious walking exercises with or without closed eyes, both in and outside (clean grass preferred)
- Body scan exercise
- Tactile physical connection exercises
- Self-soothing exercises
These are some examples of exercises and methods we could use for you to achieve your goals. As always, I put in real time and effort to use practices supported by evidence. Right now I am doing my best to write all the articles for my website and put all my knowledge into words, over time I will add references here to evidence for my methods and practices.
As always, if you have questions just contact me via the website and I will anser.
For now, let’s breathe a bit.
See you soon?