Me Time ✨ Breathing In The Moment

Happy Sunday, everybody. How are you today? My name is Jean Mitchells. I'm excited to be here. I think I start these the same way every time. If you join me often or listen to replay often, you gotta let me know. I probably need to mix it up a little bit. However, it's Sunday, and we're here, and I really do love being here with you. Hi, Jules. Hello, sunshine. So today on me time. Hello, everybody. How's it going? So great to have you here, checking in for me time. Savoring our breath. Breathing into the moment.

So I have this song in the background. I don't know if you can hear it. I teach spin classes on Sunday mornings, typically. Hello, Amar. And I played this song in my class, so I'm just gonna turn my radio up, and I hope this work. So why am I playing this song in the background? I don't know how much you know about music. Like, everybody has different tastes in music, but there is this song called Breath of Life by Florence and the Machine. And that was if you could hear it. I'm hopeful that it worked.

That is part of this song called Breath of Life. And when I teach spin classes, I often try to find a song that or a blend of songs that can really have more significant meaning or give more purpose to the ride than just 45 minutes of sweating in a dark room on bikes that go nowhere. And today, there were a couple of people in my class that I knew were going through some things, and I just really love this song. And here's why. If you listen to the words of the song, the lyrics of the song, it talks about how we use our breath.

And when I use this song in class, I actually do kind of a guided visualization during a spin class. I know, but everybody's eyes are open most of the time. But I do this visualization that invite people to take a breath and breathe into their fingers and wiggle their fingers and toes. Breathe into your shoulders. Relax your shoulders. Breathe into your. Your heart. Feel into your heart space. Feel an expansion. Take a deeper breath. And so while we're riding bikes in a dark room that go nowhere, I'll guide them through this conversation with the power of this song.

And if you have never listened to this song, I'll say it one more time. It's called Breath of Life by Florence and the Machine. And if you put your headphones on or listen to it in your car, into a space where you can turn it up loud and feel the pulse of the beat in the song, the drums in the song. It's almost as if they're like a Native American drum and they're pounding on them. And it's so visceral. And it's just a great reminder that when we go through moments, when we go through life, the biggest thing that we can rely on is our breath.

We try to hold our breath. We can practice how long we can hold our breath. There are people that have gone for three or five minutes with holding their breath. So we can practice how long we can pause our breath. We can practice how we breathe. So if you think about. I'll give you an extreme. So if you think about, you know, those days, now guys are going to tell me they don't cry, but I think you guys cry too, so just play with the example. But even if you just have a little child or a child around the house, you know how when a child or when you cry so hard and so long and you're so.

Your cry, that release of energy, that release of tears and emotion is so intense that all of a sudden you find yourself gasping for breath. You see little kids have that happen, right? Where they get to a point where they're so upset and they're crying so hard that eventually they're like. And it's startling to watch because you want them to be okay, but what's happening is their breath, their body, their energy is saying, we're done. We've crowded all out. Hey, speak, wonder. We've gotten all.

All of the emotion out. And our breath naturally tries to regulate us again. Just like when you hold your breath for too long or you swim underwater and you come back up for air, the first thing you do is you gasp for a breath. And if you're snorkeling, that is the exact opposite of what you want to do because you've taken all that water. How do I know this? Because I'm horrible at snorkeling because I always take a breath first. I'm practicing. But our breath is what regulates us. So let's go on, and let's go on a tour.

Let's go on a tour with our breath for a hot second. My invitation to you is to close your eyes. Now, if you're driving, please don't do any of this. I'm parked. The car is unparked. You can see there's nothing moving. You can see that little tower doesn't move because I'm parked. So if you're driving, please don't do this. You can do parts of this, but don't do the close Your eyes part. So if you're with me right now, live and. Or replay, and if you are willing to close your eyes, I can't see you anyway.

You can only see me. Now, my invitation to you is to just take a long, slow breath. So we're going to count into five seconds, and then we're going to exhale out. And we don't have to count out. Just exhale out slow. So we're going to draw in a big breath. Great, you're in the kitchen. Put the knives down. Don't touch the oven. Just take a breath. So long, slow breath in. Five counts in. So five, four, three, two, one, exhale. Now let's do that again. And I always count backwards, probably because I'm a spin instructor.

So big inhale. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, exhale. Let it go. Now, there are many different types of breath techniques, and I am a certified breath worker. There are techniques where you count in for a count. We just did five. And you can exhale for five, you can inhale for three, exhale for three. So you can find patterns that you can use. I like to do the five, count in, take a pause, and then simply let the air slowly release. And why do I do that? I do that because our breath naturally knows how to exhale.

We don't have to convince it to exhale. It wants to exhale. So the guidance really comes in for me in this experience. Oh, you are. Where do you do breath work? I would love to know more about you or post your Instagram channel if you'd like to, or send me a message. I'm dream big 30. I love to learn about your breath work, too. And I always love experiencing breath work. So if you're in the Twin Cities area, I'll come. But breath work, what I love about it is our bodies know naturally what to do.

They know that if we hold our breath for too long, it wants to breathe again. So what is beautiful about breath is when you consciously focus on the inhale, a pause, and an exhale. What that does is it creates a break, an intentional break for us so that our minds can focus on one thing. Inhale, pause, exhale, pause, inhale, pause, exhale, pause. When we do that, it allows our system, our mind, to have focus on one thing and not something continuous. Our breath can be continuous. Big inhale, big exhale, and make it continuous.

But intentional pauses allow us to reset, rediscover, and let go. So this time, let's do five in, pause for one second, and five out. We'll just try the five out. See what that feels like in your body. So we'll begin with a five big inhale, pause, exhale, pause. So how does that feel different for you? So the first breath we did, we did five inhale in, and then we just simply let go. The second time, we were more intentional. Five seconds in, a little pause, five seconds out. So I did that one with you, so it might have been more confusing because I wasn't counting.

I left that to you, which felt better. Better in your bodies, which felt better in your mind. Now, here's what I've discovered. For me personally, I know that when I'm super stressed, when I'm really nervous about something, I hold my breath. Everybody's different about that, right? So it's not about my way versus your way. It's about understanding what your way is. The more that we can get familiar with and understanding with what our breath is and how we. We use our breath. The exhale, it felt better.

Nice. See? Understanding. So when we can start to understand how we use our breath, how we cry, when do we gasp, when do we hold our breath naturally hold our breath, and we start to understand what is the experience that's around us that's causing us to shift our breath because we are now actually paying attention to it. I know that when I'm really stressed out and I'm teaching a spin class that. That there are times I just pull my microphone away because I'm getting too anxious. Something outside of the class is causing me to feel anxious.

But I still need to do a job, and I don't want to push that anxiety onto my room. Right? So I. When I feel that, I pull the microphone away so that I can breathe really loud. Because if I'm an instructor and I breathe really loud into the microphone, kind of sounds weird. Not gonna lie. If you've ever taken a fitness class and you can overhear someone's breathing, all instructors or most instructors, when they start to become more experienced, they learn how to use their breath so that they're not breathing into a microphone and pushing that energy out onto you.

But sometimes it's too much or I feel a lot of people's energy. So when I feel a lot of anxious energy, I feel it in my heart and my chest, and then my breath changes. And so I need to go back to trying to control my breath because I need to speak. So when we can just pay attention to it, the first step is understanding what happens when our breath, when we feel different emotions, what happens when you feel anger, you use a lot of force in your breath to get energy out. What happens when you're crying?

What happens when you're sad? What happens when you're anxious? So feeling into our breath, the minute that we can identify with how we feel in the breath, we get to choose. Is that how I want to feel with my breath? Is the breath doing the thing that I need it to do right now? So I'll give you an example when I feel really anxious or like I got a text message from somebody earlier today and they just said hi. And I was like, oh, this person doesn't usually just do that. What's coming next? And I felt like I held my breath because I was waiting for them to tell me I did something wrong.

Now that's a whole different psychological issue right there, right? I haven't seen this person in a week. One of our common friends was just in my class. I replayed our conversation. I didn't say anything stupid, so what could they possibly be saying negative to me? But I held my breath for that moment and that's where I went. Because there's often times where I've gotten similar texts where the next thing that comes isn't something great. So I've been conditioned to feel that way. Now I'm unconditioning myself.

Different conversation, different day. But to note that I held my breath, that tells me that I'm preparing for something. An emotion, an anxiety, anything. Right. And so what I can do next then is choose how to use my breath. So instead of reacting to a text where I was like, uncertain what was happening next, because my brain tries to play the landscape out ahead of me so I'm prepared. I just took some long soul breaths. And what that did is it just helped to regulate my system. Now, one thing I'm going to show you a quick tool if you've ever.

If you're in music, you might know what one of these is. It's a tuning fork. But I do a lot of work with energy. And I keep one of these in my car. And you'll see that it has a rubber mallet at the end of it. I have ones that have crystals at the back of it, but I use it for the vibration so that it can help me with my breath. So if I'm driving and I'm really tense in my car or I'm stuck in traffic, I can take this, I can hit it. It starts to vibrate. I don't know if you guys will be able to hear it or not.

But when I hit it, it starts to vibrate. But the vibration, then I take the pulse of the bottom and I put it on my chest and I breathe to this. It's a tool that I can use to help me regulate so I can feel that calm, and then I can pattern my breath against the vibration, the humming. So when we find that we're intense, when we find that we're excited, you know those times when you're also really excited and you talk super fast and somebody's like, breathe, Right? Okay, I breathed. My whole system felt different.

Now, using breath work, there's a lot of different ways you can do it. You can plug one side of your nose and then the other side. So from an energy perspective, if I want to activate more calming energy, I might plug the right side of my nose. Only breathe in my left side of my nose. That breath energetically is your divine feminine, which is energy, but it's also a nurturing breath. So if I only breathe in through my left nostril, I can find calm. On the flip side, if I want to feel more activated, if I'm too calm and I need to activate a little, I can plug the left side of my nose and only breathe in through my right side.

So I'm activating my divine masculine, the side of my body that is forward moving energetically speaking, there's a lot more to it. That's just the highlights. You can do a full circle breath where you breathe in through your left and exhale out through your right. I call that one. There's lots of things that you can call it, but for right now, let's just call it the circle of breath. And breathing in through that left, exhaling out through that right. It's an activation in a breath. So there are many ways that we can use our breath to just reset our systems, to be meditative, to be happy, to regulate, to find joy.

So my last invitation to you in finding breath right now is to take a deep breath now. Don't do this just yet. When I say let's go, we'll go. But we're going to take a deep breath and then we're going to feel into our bodies. And wherever we feel tension in our bodies, I want us to visualize sending the breath there. So think about your body right now. For me, this is going to sound weird, but my front shin is hurting, and my left leg, I'm very specific. It's my left leg, it's my front shin. So what I'm gonna do is I'm Gonna do a little visualization.

Now, when you use breath with your brain, so not just focusing on the breath, but you use it with your brain. I like to use colors. Colors work for me because I can see colors in particles. And when you think about breath, our breath is just a huge inhale of a bunch of particles of air. Air that we can't even see, right? So tiny, tiny little particles like dust floating through the sky. So when I breathe, sometimes I'll envision a color. So right now I'm going to use the color gold. It's a warm color.

It's sunshine. So when you breathe in, wherever you identify tension in your body, I just want you to close your eyes, envision gold, and envision gold coming in through your nose or your mouth, wherever you choose to inhale. And allow it to go down your nostrils. And then sen it to wherever you feel tension in your body. So you might need a long breath to get it there. And then pause. Allow that gold energy to sit in that space, and then exhale and feel that golden energy. Leave that space with a little gold behind and the next exit your body.

So let's try that 1 in 3, 2, 1. Visualize that gold energy. Take a big inhale. Feel that gold energy move through your nostrils, down to or up to wherever in your body feels tense. Pause, Allow that golden energy to expand in that space, and then simply exhale, leaving a little of that gold behind and exhaling out the rest. You can open your eyes if they were closed. How does he feel? What did you notice? Now, my invitation to you is to do that a few times on repeat, but I wanted to give you a few samples of how we can use our breath to savor the moment, how we can use our breath to regulate ourselves, how we can use our breath to feel expansion in our bodies, how we can use our breath to send energy to wherever we're feeling stuck or hurt or tense, and allow our breath to work with us.

It's magical. So I'll do more on breath. I'll do more with breath work. And to my fellow breath work facilitator, thank you for being here. I'm excited to meet you and I'll see you guys all soon. If you want to follow me on Instagram, I'm Dream Big 30. You can send me notes here, you can send me notes there, there, but mostly just have the best day. And by best, just whatever today is, make it yours. And I hope you all have a great rest of your afternoon and I'll see you soon.