Welcome to first this, a short mindfulness practice and message for any time.

I'm Catherine Nicolai, and I'm really glad you're here.

For today's practice, we are going to continue our breath school series, and we'll be working on a breathing

technique for relieving stress and anxiety. But first, let's get comfortable. You can do this

breath work from a seated or supine position.

Mostly you want to make sure that you have space to open your chest a bit and breathe deeply.

And as always, when we are working with our breath, if you feel at any point you should stop, you just will.

Let's prime the pump with a big breath in through the nose.

Sigh through your mouth. Do it again. Breathe in. Let it out. Good. If it's okay with you, close your eyes. Let's take a minute or so to just breathe naturally through your nose and see how it feels. Thank you. If your mind wandered, just come on back, you're just noticing how it feels in your body to breathe naturally. Notice which parts of your body move when you breathe. The When we're anxious, we tend to breathe in the tops of our lungs.

Breaths get faster and our shoulders go up and down with each breath.

Okay. shoulders go up and down in our lungs. The belly moves rather than the shoulders.

So just notice where you're starting from.

When I owned my yoga studio, I noticed that when students walked into the yoga room in particular,

which was silent, warm, and dark, they would naturally let out a sigh.

And that sigh is a way our bodies regulate the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide.

CO2 can build up when we take those shallow, anxious breaths. So you may need a way to reset, rebalance the gases, and here is a simple way to do it.

We'll take a double inhale through the nose.

The first inhale pretty long, getting you pretty close to full.

Then a quick pause and right away another inhale to fill as much long space as possible.

Then a long sigh through the mouth.

It sounds like this.

Let's do three of these.

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