Pranayama Deep Breathing Exercises

By Nicole Reed

Our breath is our vital energy source connecting us to our emotions, awareness, thoughts and higher consciousness. When life throws you a curve ball, relax and practice this exercise:

• Visualize your self in a calm place: be it the ocean, yoga studio, home or on pristine mountains. See, smell, taste, and feel the serenity. Really take it in and soak it up.
• Practice pranayama breathing exercises: take a very slow and heavy, deep inhale through your nostrils filling first your lungs and then the lowest part of your abdomen.
• Breathe in for a five count (working your way up to 10 counts as you get more comfortable and advanced).
• Now hold. Hold for a five count (working your way up to 10 counts when you are ready). 


• Finally release the breath through your mouth. Visualize all your stress, negativity, and toxins leaving your body during the exhale. Exhale. Exhale. Exhale. Release on a five count (working up to a 10 count when you are ready).
• Finally, to add more improved benefits to this practice, if you are able, lie down in svanasana “dead man’s pose.”
• Lay on your back with your arms resting by your side and your legs stretching out and away from the body. Close your eyes now, rest the eyelids and feel your breath rise and fall.
• Picture a white light cascading down on to the crown of your head. This is your source; this is the divine connection. Relax the mind. Relax the emotions. Relax the body and sink, melt, in to the light. You are home.
• Breathe. We are all one. Guard your heart, thoughts, and emotions…thought shifts consciousness for the better or the worse. If you want to see a change in the world, you must not work on controlling or changing others…you must transform yourself from the inside out. Self-control. Meditate. Breathe. Love. Life and love are in your power.
  

Namaste.