0:39

Hi friends. I have an extra special, bonus for you today. This episode of Picture Love came from a very heartfelt conversation I had with Laura Rocca who shared her story of overcoming pain and illness And she credits a lot of her healing to this simple breath work exercise, which I'm going to share with you now. And if you do happen to be behind the wheel right now, not to worry, this is not something that will impair anybody's function to drive. Of course, please pay attention to where you are. But this should support you and your focus while you're on the road. Here we go.

Kris LeDonne 1:23

Laura, I wouldn't put you on the spot if you hadn't said so before we were recording. Would you lead us in a little bit of breathwork? Just for a little sampling for somebody who's saying, what is that? I already know how to breathe I'm not familiar with breathwork, or somebody who is into it and listening to this saying, Ooh, yay. another chance to practice. Well, I want to just tell you first and all your listeners, there's many different types of breath work that I teach. I teach something called conscious connected breath work, yogic breath work, and somatic breath work. So obviously we can't do them all today, right? But I'm going to teach something called yogic breath work, which is the ocean breath. Okay. Which, and the reason I'm going to teach that is like, we can do it pretty quickly and it's an easy, quick way to regulate your nervous system. And it's something you can put into practice any time of the day, you can be doing it when you're doing the laundry, the dishes, driving the car. You don't have to sit down and have a formal practice to do it. And I will tell you this breath, one breath, has basically changed my life. Along with the other ones too, but this one was the most important one for me. And it's the basis for all yogic breathing. Can you, before you jump in, can you just tell us what would happen in their day that cued them that this would be a really good idea? Give me a cue. What would make somebody want to do it? Well, what the ocean breath does is it can create balance in our body. So let's say you're feeling a little sluggish in your day. You might say, Oh, let me try the ocean breath. Or let's say you're going to have a presentation or go on a podcast. You might say, Oh, I need to calm down a little bit, so it can bring you up when you're feeling down and down when you're feeling up. So that's why it's a balancing breath. And here's the other why behind it. So what we're going to be doing in this practice is we're activating our vagus nerve. And for those of you that don't know it comes from the back of our brainstem all the way down to our pelvis. And it's actually more than one nerve. They just call it the vagus nerve, but it's the wonder nerve. It's the wanderer and it has branches that go into our heart, lungs and all our organs, our digestive tract, our pelvic organs. So stimulating that nerve can give you a parasympathetic response in your nervous system, which is your calm, Your rest, your digest response. That's the why we're going to do it. Okay, so the way I teach this breath first is through the mouth. Now, I promote breathing through the nose because when we breathe through the nose, that's when we have parasympathetic activity, our calm, our rest, and our digest. When we breathe through the mouth, That's when we have a sympathetic charge in our nervous system. So we don't always want that. And there's no filtration system going through that. So I'm just going to teach it that way, but then the actual practice is through the nose. So I'm going to invite you in a moment to take your hand and put it in front of your mouth. So we're going to take our hand, put it in front of our mouth and pretend you're fogging up the mirror. And now I want you to do it on the inhale as well as the exhale. Mm. Nice, gentle breath. Okay. So it's not a quick cough. Not like. Okay. So you're kind of sounding like the ocean, like Darth Vader. And you might get a little bit of a dry throat right when you're starting that. And what you're doing is you're constricting your glottis. That's the space between your vocal cords. So now what I'm going to ask you to do is close your mouth, bring your awareness and your attention to the back of your throat and breathing in and out through your nose. And you can maybe hear the sound almost like a seashell up to your ear. And if you're listening out there just doing like four or five breath cycles and your tongue is resting mostly right behind your front teeth on the top of your mouth. And just making that ocean sound and just start to notice what you feel in your body. Does it feel calmer, more relaxed? Did your shoulders drop less tension? Your jaw? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So just noticing that. So I'm going to invite you and your listeners to just even practice it maybe a couple times a day. Just to get the hang of it first thing in the morning, maybe just set a timer for one minute. And then try 1 minute in the afternoon. And 1 minute at night and just seeing how your body responds. After one minute of practice, one minute, three times a day and seeing if that makes a change. That is very calming and soothing. And I, I was even feeling tingly in my legs. There's a lot of sensations, happy, tingly, just very, very subtle, but very soothing. And you can do this all the time. You can do it while you're driving a car. You don't even have to keep your eyes closed. It's just another way of breathing. Yeah. I could see myself implementing that into like a photo sorting session when somebody is just dealing with a lot of, you know, tidying up their digital or their printed photos. And sometimes we just get really tense when we're doing something like decision fatigue. And this would be a really great mental break from decision fatigue. Or just, before even starting, just to come into it with a calm clarity, that's, it's gorgeous. Absolutely. And you don't know this, but every single time you've been talking, I've been doing the ocean breath. Cause I've adopted it into my normal breathing pattern. Yes. Yes. And you don't have to do it to bother a neighbor. The whole open mouth was to teach me, to teach us what it sounds like before we're actually doing it. It was like, exactly the best way that I found to teach this breath so people can understand it.

8:00

Well, if you're new to picture love, you may not realize that was a highly unusual bonus. I hope this was either A helpful. introduction to something that you needed today. Or a friendly reminder of how a simple breathing exercise can truly help all of us function where fully. And obviously without the breath. How can we ever picture love in our lives?