Press pause

Title: Breathing for balance

Adding breathing exercises to your day can help reduce stress and make you feel more balanced. Start with 5 minutes a day and gradually work your way up until you're getting about 20 minutes. Today, we're going to breathe in balance and calm, and breathe out stress, worry and anxiety. When you're doing this exercise on your own, you can change the words to whatever you need in the moment.

If you want to breathe in comfort and breathe out pain, do that. The goal is to help focus our thoughts on what we want and release the feelings we don't want. Let's get started. First, find a comfortable place to sit or lie down. Now I want you just to become aware of your breathing. Don't change how you're normally breathing.

Breathe in normally. Exhale normally. Just notice how your breathing. Now I want you to put one hand on your lower abdomen, just below your belly button, and breathe in normally and breathe out normally. Now, I want you to rotate between breathing normally and taking some deep breaths. Breathe in, breathe out. Take a deep breath in, deep breath out.

Normal breath in normal breath out. Deep breath in deep breath out.

When you take a deep breath, you should feel that hand on your lower stomach. Rise and fall. Breathe in breathe out. Notice the difference in how your normal breathing and your deep breathing make you feel. Now let's just practice deep breathing. I want you to breathe in for a count of five. One, two, three, four, five and now exhale. One, two, three, four, five and that's inhale. And while you're breathing in, I want you to imagine you are breathing in balance and calm, breathing in balance and calm.

Now, when you breathe out, imagine you are breathing out all of your stress, worry and anxiety. Breathe in calm, peace and balance. Breathe out worries, stress, breathe in balance and peace. Breathe out anxiety and worries. Inhale balance, exhale, worry, inhale. Calm. Peace, balance. Exhale, stress. Worries and anxiety.

Breathe in peace. Calm. Balance. Breathe out all your worries, stress and anxiety. Fill your stomach. Rise and fall as you inhale, balance and exhale all your worries Continue this breathing until you feel calm, relaxed and balanced.