Friday Exhale - Honoring How Far You’ve Come

Hello everybody. Whatever day you're calling in or listening in, for me it's Friday. And on Friday I do this Friday exhale. So I'm gonna hang out here for just a second and before we start I'll just give you a little update. If we haven't been together before, my name is Jean Mitchells. I've been a contributor now for three years, just over three years. And it's so great to be here with all of you. I'll also be popping in as a cadre coach soon. So all the really good things. I am sitting here with my plant hat.

This is Melman behind me. And one of the hats that I wear is I teach indoor cycling classes at a studio that I co-own. And yeah, so there's a little bit about me. We'll learn more about each other as we go. And that's just a few of the hats that I wear. So today on Friday, I've seen some hearts pop in. So thank you if you're here. It's nice to have you here. But let's start. Let's start with Friday Exhale. So when we come into this moment, I like to guide us through just a couple of quick breaths to just relax.

Our breath can do so much for our systems. Our breath naturally regulates our emotions. You can tell if you're tense. You can tell if you're relaxed. I had an episode where I was processing a lot of motion and I was crying so hard that at the end of it I started gasping to just regulate my system a little bit. So our breath can do so much magic for us. So today on today's breath I'm going to invite us to find softness. And I'm going to do a very intentional breath pattern. outside of our normal, take a big inhale, pause, exhale, which does a lot.

So we're going to do that breath, inhale, pause, exhale. We're going to do that three times. And then I'm going to show you a different breath. It's going to allow us to get into a calmer side of ourselves. We've heard of yin and yang. We've heard of feminine energy, masculine energy. That's not about sexuality. It's just about energy and how energy works in our bodies. Oh, one of the hats I wear, I'm a Reiki master, so I'm into a little bit of that new agey, old agey things. So we're gonna start with a couple of breaths.

Take a big inhale with me. Pause for a second, exhale. If you like to count, my invitation to you is count for three, pause, exhale for three, pause. So let's start that. Inhale. Pause. Exhale. On this round, I'm going to invite you to squeeze your shoulders up on the inhale and relax your shoulders down on the exhale. So let's try that. Inhale. Exhale. Doesn't that feel good? Activating your body with your breath. So one more, however works for you. Inhale. Pause. Exhale. Let go. Ah, that feels good.

It feels good to just take a moment It's Friday and I feel like I've been racing through my day trying to get to something, right? There's always the countdown of getting to the next thing. So inside this moment, my invitation is to let go of the count and simply be in the moment. So the breath I'm going to invite you to do is a breath that's a very nurturing breath. There's so many ways to breathe and do breath work. There's facilitated breath work. There's different ways to reset your systems.

So here's my invitation to you. Your left nostril, so this is my left side. So if you're looking at me, it might be over here. I'm going to invite you to use just an index finger and we're going to push on our right nostril And we're simply going to breathe in and out through our left nostril. And we're going to do it three times. So if you want to do that three inhale, pause, exhale. But we're only going to focus on breathing through our left nostril. And just check in with your body and how that feels.

So we'll start, push, inhale, pause, exhale. Again, inhale, pause, exhale. Last time. Inhale, pause, exhale. What does that feel like in your system? If you're not driving a car or moving a vehicle, riding a bike, feel free to type in the chat. So intentionally breathing through your left nostril is activating the left side of our body. And in an energy world, the left side of our body is our divine feminine. So it's energy. It can be our yin side. Yang side is our active side, our right side, or our divine masculine side.

So by breathing only in and out of the left nostril, why did I offer that today? It's helped me to just calm down today. So as I mentioned, I have been racing from one thing to the next, feeling very unproductive in tactically doing things. But my heart has been so full because I've been able to meet with a lot of different people. and see different friends and different connections, and it's just been that day of more people interaction versus tactically doing things. And why that's creating a little angst for me is I fly out of the country on Sunday, and I have a lot of things between now and then for both work and packing and preparing to get done.

But I have overlayered myself with activities. teaching spin classes, leading sound baths. Tonight I'm teaching a spin class and going to a concert, like the things we do. And when I breathe only into the left side of my body, the divine feminine side, the yin side of our body, it's nurturing and it reminds us to activate the side of ourselves that invites calm, slowness. So in the days when I feel like I'm so in that overdoing mode, that overactive mode, taking a pause to reset as I go into the weekend or to the evening and breathing only in and out of my left side helps me to feel that nurturing breath, that slowness.

So there's my invitation for you. And in this space on today, Friday, as we slow down, it's honoring you, honoring your journey and honoring how far you've come. So wherever you, whatever you've done this week, whatever you've accomplished this week, I want you to think back a year in your past and reflect on what's something that you're proud of than in the last year that you've accomplished. And maybe that one thing could be you allowed yourself to grieve. Or maybe that one thing is you allowed yourself to be creative and start to reactivate your artistic side.

Really, it could be anything. So for me, I'm honoring how far I've come. What that means for me is I have been running marathons for charities for the last two and a half, almost three years in honor of the loss of my mom and dad. Now, I'm really lucky. I'm an adult child. I have a sibling and our parents lived into their eighties, but loss is loss, right? Our father had Alzheimer's, so we kind of got to see the transition for him. But it's not easy to watch people go through those things, right?

Our mom, she died of old age and she was just ready to go home. But it was hard for me because I was their caretaker. I was the one that they would call when they needed something. I would go see them on certain days and make sure they were okay. And it just felt like this big void. But it also felt like I was giving back to them something that they had always given to me, which is love and care and concern. And so I've literally been running around the world. Literally processing my grief, trying to find a new space to fill that void.

And the honor of how far I've come, I have one more marathon to go. And that'll be in April. I'm raising a whole bunch of money for it. And I'm very honored to be a part of this charity team. But when I was running this last marathon, it happened to be in Sydney, Australia. I had a breakdown. I literally had a breakdown on the course. Full meltdown. I stopped at a certain mileage. I was crying hysterically. I was processing everything. And one of the things that I processed was why I was doing these marathons.

What started this journey? Why was I there? And I got through the marathon. I did it. And I'm so happy that I did. But what I realized is along this journey, I have been able to process my grief. I've been able to heal. I have been able to meet new people who are from the United States and some not. And we have a group chat and we talk about races and when's the next one and what's going on in our lives. And we plan times or races to meet up to go see each other and I realize that through this process, while I've lost something that left a huge void, in this journey, my mom and dad gave me a gift back.

New friends, new experiences. I've seen cool places, Tokyo and Japan, Sydney, Australia, London, which I love, Berlin, which I'd never been to and Prague. I've been so fortunate to see these places and feel my mom and dad with me along the way and share it with them in a different way. And along that way, I've been able to heal. Now everybody's grieving process is different and honestly, we grieve a lot. Lots of friendships, changing of jobs, changing of the weather. There's so many opportunities to feel that void, that transition.

But if we honor the moment that we're in and we look back to see how much we've grown along the way, it doesn't have to be huge, but we can take a breath, we can slow down activating our left side breath, and we can look back to honor our journey The journey that we've been on. Honor that we're here in this moment taking time for ourselves. And that whatever we're doing right now, we're planting the seeds of our future self. So a year from now, we can look back and say, look how far we've come. And maybe that distance is really small.

And maybe it feels like we move backwards. But I guarantee you there's movement. And in this journey, we're in it together. We all process differently, but we move together. So Friday, take that pause, find that breath, allow yourself to exhale. And then honor how much you've grown and how incredible you are in this very moment. So my name is Jean. It's awesome to be here with you. I'll be popping in a little more and over the next couple of weeks I'll be popping in from a foreign country. First stop is a couple of nights in Thailand, Bangkok specifically, and then I'm on a 10-day retreat in Bhutan.

And if you've never heard of Bhutan, many haven't, Google it. Look at a map, check it out, and I'll tell you more along the way. Happy Friday.