Every breath is a gift, even when we’re not running from lions

Every breath is a precious gift, an opportunity to move forward, to make a choice to do better.

Ashtanga yoga focuses on the breath so that we become fully aware of the breath....

• How it moves through the body
  
• Where it might get stuck
  
• How the depth and speed of the breath affects tension in the muscles, our heart rate, our ability to think clearly and our mood.
  

The thing is we don’t often need to run from lions anymore, but sometimes we breathe as though we do.....
We take about 20,000 breaths a day. Fast and shallow breathing is a primal response to stress, it’s very useful when you need to run from lions, but it’s not so useful when we’re constantly stressing about queues, bills, traffic, the boss etc.

Frequent stress means we can end up constantly breathing as though we need to run from a lion, only using the top third of our lungs. But the bottom third of our lungs supply two-thirds of our breathing capacity.

Shallow breaths mean we aren’t supplying our bodies with sufficient oxygen and replenishing the brain and other vital organs with nutrients.

Well, it’s a good thing that we start and end every class with focussed deep breathing practices and throughout the moving sequence we continue to breath deeply and rhythmically, using the breath to find space. Come to class to find and enjoy your breath again....even if you do sometimes run from lions

#ComeToClass #BecomeBreathAware