Inhale: Heart Coherence Breathing
Honeys ♥︎ I know that many of us are feeling disoriented right now, and that's perfectly natural - the world’s changing at a rapid pace, and we're in the bag-of-goo phase of the caterpillar turning into the butterfly.
Something that's helping me boost my sense of resilience is finding ways to ground myself in my psychical body as much as possible. Touching in with my breath, my feeling state, movement + nature. Dropping out of the chaos that my mind tries to create + into the calm of my heart.
A fav practice for this is called Heart Coherence Breathing (via @heartmath).
All you need to do to practice it is:
♡ Drop your attention down to your heart center, and imagine your breath flowing in and out of that space
♡ Breathing through the nose, take a deep, full inhale into your belly, and then a full exhale
♡ This breath is slow - usually a minimum of 4 seconds on each inhale/exhale
♡ While you're breathing, start conjuring up an elevated, regenerative emotion - like love, peace, or gratitude (you can even bring to mind someone/something that you love deeply, if that helps), and let it infuse each breath
I like to practice this for a minimum of 5 min (but typically go longer), but you'd be surprised how much can shift in just a min if you really focus.
And for some quick deets re: why/how this works:
♡ The heart sends far more neural signals to the brain through the nervous system than the brain sends to the heart
♡ The heart is the most powerful source of electromagnetic energy in the body - its electrical field is about 60x greater in amplitude than the electrical activity generated by the brain
♡ The magnetic field of the heart is more than 100x greater in strength than that of the brain + can be detected up to 3 ft. away from the body, in all directions
♡ The quality of the signals between the heart + brain have huge effects on both brain function + personal experience - influencing things like memory, perception, intention, problem-solving, decision-making, performance, and emotional processing
♡ We want is for there to be coherent signals being sent between the two, rather than incoherent signals, so we can return to a natural state of harmony - and that's what Heart Coherent Breathing does for us
Happy pausing, breathing, feeling, balancing, my loves.