Good evening, everybody. How y'all doing? How's the week going for you?

Ooh, hanging in there. Just a little moment to remind you all to just pause. Check in with

yourself. How are we feeling? Where in our bodies are we feeling it? Let's just connect.

How deeply are we breathing? Remember the depth of your breath,

whether shallow and short and quick or full and slow and deep speaks to where we are emotionally.

Our breath is always going to be a good barometer for where we are emotionally and where our bodies are,

our nervous system. And it's also, as always, one of the most powerful ways that we can

soothe ourselves. So check in on that. If you're not breathing slowly and deeply, also, as always, one of the most powerful ways that we can soothe ourselves.

So check in on that. If you're not breathing slowly and deeply, well, then you are aroused.

Now, we don't mean that in a neurotic way. Arousal means hyperactivated. It means you are

living a little bit more in your sympathetic nervous system, which is more of the fight or flight,

so you're maybe stressed or overwhelmed or upset or frustrated or in the middle of an argument with someone.

We're just breathing deeply, deeply into our bodies, holding it, right?

And that slows down our nervous system.

That brings us back into our rational thinking.

When our breathing is short or shallow, we again are not in our more regulated brain.

So we're breathing to center ourselves. I have to do that throughout the day.

Letting my breath remind me of where I'm at, but also being a really powerful tool

to work with ourselves. So I was talking about this earlier in the week, how I was reading

this article on silence and I wanted to talk about it. It was, it was impactful for me

because I'm someone who talks a lot. You know, is that my personality style or is that really

driven by the work I do? Depends a little bit of both, right? As a therapist, there's a lot of talking

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