Relieve Anxiety the Natural Way
Recorded in Fall 2019
Back by popular demand: Sarah Gilbert gives you the inside story on how she transformed her relationship to anxiety. In a huge bonus she also teaches two simple techniques you can use right away to deal with anxiety and stress.
Sarah is a special needs advocate, mom to two teenagers, and dedicated yoga practitioner in Yoga for the Special Child and Yoga Spirit. Her warm and open sharing of her struggles and growth is inspirational and also full of insights you can put directly into action.
“I look back on my life and I think that I've had anxiety for a good part of my life, but I had no idea. Breath gave me the ability to cope with my anxiety. And the best part about the breath is that you can do it anywhere to make yourself feel a little bit more present, a little more in control…all it takes is just a couple of deep breaths.”
Show takeaways:
Some ways anxiety manifests in adults:
Racing thoughts.
Fear that you can't identify, you can't explain.
Sweaty palms, clenched or burn in belly-like butterflies but not “first kiss” butterflies!
A feeling that “everything is bad” or “everything will turn out bad”
Shallow or rapid breathing
Gastrointestinal problems
Trouble sleeping
Feeling weepy
Trembling hands
Can only concentrate on present worry
Some ways anxiety manifests in kids:
Trouble concentrating in class
Avoidance behaviors like disconnecting from activity, going to restroom
Rapid or shallow breathing
Fidgeting
“Zoning out” during school
Stomach aches
Refusing to go to school or frequent meltdowns after school
Trouble with transitions
Having high self-expectations for sports or school work that cause distress
Trouble picking clothing for school
Feeling dizzy, shaky, or sweaty
Picking at skin
Nail biting
Being self-critical
Avoiding friends
Some science-lite stuff on breathing and how it effects your body and mind:
Everyone has their own breathing pattern; and when you learn your own pattern you can recognize when it’s useful and when it may be headed towards anxiety, and how to shift it to a more beneficial pattern.
When you are in a very anxious moment, your body responds by firing the sympathetic nervous system; this is the part of your body that has evolved to help you escape life-threatening danger. Think “fight or flight” reaction; your body is primed to fight or run for it’s life. But! You can use our breath to turn this reaction off and instead activate the parasympathetic nervous system. Taking a deep breath helps to down-regulate the fight or flight response. If you take a few minutes to breath slowly, you can even switch on the parasympathetic nervous system. When this system is on, every thing is hunky-dory…your heart rate goes down, your digestion turns back on, sweaty palms go away, blood pressure regulates, and thought patterns turn back to a neutral pattern.
The super-cool thing is that you can still be having panicky thoughts and just engage with the breathing technique; think of it like using your body to influence your mind. By mangagin your breath, your body teaches your mind that it is safe and can…well.. calm the frick down so you can feel better!
Use times when you are feeling less anxious to practice the breathing technique; this will make your learning process more fun and enjoyable. And much easier for you to implement the technique when the stress hits!
Full Transcript:
Gita:
Music. Hello my friend and welcome to the Gita Brown show bringing harmony into everyday life. I love creativity and I love wellness and I've been teaching both for 30 years. To be creative. It's helpful if you have a lifestyle that supports your wellness because that's where creativity starts. My philosophy is simple and based in yoga tradition; simple practices done daily over a long period of time will naturally lead you to a lifestyle full of wellness, and from there your creativity can flow.
So you could think of today's show like a little mini-class with me and my special guest teacher, Ms. Sarah Gilbert. We're going to talk about how to use breath to calm your mind. We're going to talk a little bit of sort of philosophy and ways to think about breathing a little bit, but it's going to be all about the practice today. Because I had Ms. Sarah Gilbert on a previous episode, I believe it was episode number four, and she was such a colossal hit and inundated with messages and people asking us more about the breath and to share her story with anxiety that I thought we got to bring her back on again.
So for those of you who didn't catch that episode, check it out. It's episode number four of the Gita Brown Show. I highly recommend it. You do a little more of a deeper dive into your story of anxiety in that one. But for those of you who haven't met the lovely Sarah Gilbert, let me introduce you to her now. She is an absolutely tireless advocate for people with special needs. She's a licensed Yoga for the Special Child practitioner and a licensed Yoga Spirit practitioner. You also have experience in marketing management and business management. Ooh, and she's a wonderful advocate to her daughter may see who has special needs. She happens to have Down syndrome. And that's actually how we met is I began teaching your daughter yoga many moons ago. So that episode number four was all about having anxiety and how you transformed it through many means.
But we also landed on the breath as being that like. "back pocket tool" that people can use. So we're going to go way more into the breathing techniques today guys. So make sure you're comfortable wherever you are. Even if you're driving, you can do this show today cause you can breathe and drive at the same time. In fact, it will be better than yelling at the person in front of you for not going fast enough. So Sarah, really quickly, can you give people just a tiny recap of like your story of anxiety and how you use the breath to sort of pivot things for you a little bit? And then we'll get into teaching some folks some wonderful breathing practices.
Sarah:
Sure.
Gita:
Thank you. I'm so happy you're here.
Sarah:
Thank you. I'm happy to be here!
Gita:
Love fest! And now we're moving on. (laughs).
Sarah:
So quick recap. Anxiety. Yes. Anxiety stinks. Yeah. It's just does not feel good. So, um, yes, as Gita said, I am a wife. I'm a mother of two teenagers. So that in and of itself is anxiety. (laughs)
Um, my daughter, yes, Macy has, um, she's 13. She was born into a body that happened to have down syndrome and that was really tricky for my husband and I when she was first born and it created, it was kind of the start of the anxiety in me. I didn't know it at the time. Um, but as the years went on, yeah, anxiety started to pretty much take over. Um, Macy and Gita met, started practicing yoga. It will actually be eight years in November. I know. It is. It's amazing. And a few years into Macy and Gita's yoga practice, when I saw that their beautiful connection and the way they were able to work together and the way Macy was able to use yoga and her breath in particular to regulate her body and her emotions, um, it was just mind boggling to me. I didn't know anything about yoga at the time, really.
And, um, so as life continued to throw curve balls my way and into my family, um, I needed a way to cope. I needed to really take care of myself so that I could take care of my family and my kids. So I turned to yoga. And the one thing that I did find in yoga that I really resonated with the most and that really tackled or helped me tackle my anxiety and to give me ways to cope and to really manage the anxiety was through breath. And I found the best part about breath is that you, like you just said, you can do it anywhere. You can do it anywhere to make yourself feel a little bit more present, a little bit more in control, a little bit, you know, less than that "fight or flight"feeling that you might have. Um, and it, it all it takes is just a couple of deep breaths.
Gita:
Amen. We could just say done. Go breathe, people! (laughs)
Sarah:
laughter
Gita:
Thank you for sharing that. Um, as you know, and I've shared with viewers and you many times, I too have had my struggles with anxiety. Perhaps that's why we resonate so well together. And it is so absolutely transformative to start to realize that you have this thing that's with you all the time that you can both observe and manage to shift things a little bit. And I think that was the part of that last episode that really sort of blew up for people. I put some little tiny clip y'all up on like Facebook. It was some little like thirty-secone clip of this lady talking and it just, I would say it exploded really. I think there was, I lost track of the comments. You were getting private messages. I was getting private messages and people were going, I had no idea that I could breathe differently.
Please teach me more. Right. I was like, I think you and I are both like wow, this really resonated. So we wanted to kind of get into the breath a little more. Because at the end of that last episode, I think I led perhaps three or four deep breaths and that was about it. So I want to talk about it a little bit more. So how this class for you guys is going to work. I'm going to give a little bit of just body stuff about the breath, how it works on the mind, the nervous system, but just a teeny bit so that you understand the theory of the breath because it's nice to have the experience in your body, but our minds love to play with concepts and to understand how things work and it makes it more likely that we'll actually do it, I think when we know why.
And then Sarah is going to teach a breathing thing. I'm going to give a little clarification and then you have a special ratio breath and I'm going to be her student. And I've never done this before. She's never taught me this breath before too. So I'll be a little role model student for you, I promise. Um, and so we're gonna take you through some of that. So that's how it's gonna roll people. So let's get started. So, Oh, I skipped something. So sorry, pause for effect here. I'm going to talk about how the breath works in a minute. Can you back up a little bit though and back me up to talk about how anxiety actually manifests because some people who might be listening to this might be a little bit interested in figuring out. They think, Oh, I don't have anxiety, my kids don't have anxiety. But you and I as yoga teachers, we know that it's at epidemic level proportions. It is one of the number one mental health concerns for people in the U S today. Yes. But a lot of times people don't even know that they have it. So briefly before I give the scientific fact-ola's on breathing, can you talk about how to identify anxiety like in yourself and then especially in kids? Cause I think it's a little different. Sure.
Sarah:
Yes. Um, so yeah, anxiety for I, I, I had anxiety now that I can recognize the anxiety in myself and I know that's what it is. I look back on my life and I think that I've had anxiety for a good part of my life, but I had no idea. And when I was a kid, um, you know, I would get this pit in my stomach. I would get, um, the, the, the yucky bullet butterfly feeling like not that first kiss butterfly feeling. It's like yucky. Um, and I would get sweaty palms all the time and I would have racing thoughts but I didn't know what it was until later on in life. So yes, those are some of the, those are some of the, um, the ways that can manifest. Racing thoughts. Um, fear of having this fear that you can't identify, you can't explain.
Gita:
My husband calls it "chicken little syndrome"When I start to do this kind of thing's going to happen and that things apparently he's like, Whoa, chicken little and I recognize now, Oh, that's anxiety. That's their racing thoughts. Like everything is horrible. Yes. And everybody is going to happen in the future is horrible.
Sarah:
Everything that yeah, they could possibly, you know, things that, but it feels real at the time. It feels very real. And um, yes. And it's, it's kind of a nasty cycle.
Gita:
Yes. Telling someone that they are chicken little in that moment is not helpful. It's not helpful. It's like, tell us funny later on, but at the time it feels so real that like talking to someone who is in that anxious moment or if they're headed towards a panic attack and trying to convince them that it's all in their head, well that's not exactly useful. Right. That's where we enter as yoga teachers and we get to the breath. That's right. It doesn't manifest the same way. Now for you as an adult, is it different?
Sarah:
Oh yeah, it definitely does. Um, it, you know, the difference is now that I can identify it and I can talk about it and explain how I feel. Um, in kids, you know, I have seen and heard stories about kids who have been in school and, um, are identified and labeled by their teachers as possibly having a, an attention disorder, like an ADHD or something like that. Some because the kids will tend to zone out or they'll, um, become kind of fidgety in their seats or they'll get up to go to the bathroom three times during a class or they'll do all do these things that might look a little bit like attention disorders. If you want, if that's what you want to call it. But in reality it's actually because they are so anxious, the kids are so anxious and they don't know why they're feeling the way they are and they can't.
They can't, they don't know how to calm it within themselves. And so rather than try to pay attention, it might be too overwhelming, whatever's being taught in the class. So instead of just trying, they just zone out and they stare out the window or they get up to escape and go to the bathroom. Um, it's things like that and they don't know how to talk to somebody about the bad ways that they're feeling cause they don't really understand it. Um, which is hard, but, um, but luckily they can learn how to breathe properly sitting in their desk at school while the teacher is talking or you know, or any, anywhere they are, and they can just, um, help to calm themselves a little bit.
Gita:
That's so helpful because if it's manifesting in different ways, that says to me in that moment when they're zoning out or doing that avoidance behavior that's total "fight or flight response," which is what I was going to actually talk about. What a lovely segue as if we planned it (laughs)
Sarah:
One thing, let me add one of the messages that I did receive after the last episode we, um, we did was with a friend of mine, um, and whose child was going through a huge amount of transition that the in her life. And her father was really worried about he.r and he said, so when I started to talk to him a little bit more in depth about breath and how it can work and ways to do it and all that. And he said, Oh my gosh, so you mean the other day when my daughter got off the bus and she came home and she was, um, her breath was very raspy, kind of raspy and very fast. He said, I can so that you're telling me I could actually hear her anxiety coming out. And I said, yeah, you could. And she just doesn't know how to explain it. She just has too much going on in her head and her mind and her heart and her, everything that. But you could, you could hear her anxiety coming out of her breath. Wow.
Gita:
Love that. It's like be listening not to words but to breathing patterns. Yeah. Yeah. And as yoga teachers we do that all the time.
Gita:
Yes. Ah, pause for a deep breath. I love that. Listening for the anxiety, listening to the pattern in the breath, we're going to talk about that actually when we do our own breathing cause everyone has their own sort of pattern of breathing and you can start to learn for yourself how to identify when you're sort of at a neutral place and when that breathing for yourself starts to shift and if you can catch it, Oh that's when the magic happens. So in that moment, like when she got off the bus, she was totally in what we would call a fight or flight mode. Right. That's like that primitive part of your brain that was there to tell you that you're being chased by something that is going to eat you and it fires and basically shuts down all rational cognition. It takes blood away from your extremities because it wants to protect your heart and your internal organs, which is why you get like the cold hands.
It can make you a little bit sweaty. If you think of it back in the day, you want it to be a little sweaty to elude capture, right? Someone grabs onto you and you're sweaty. So that has a very real function in the body. However, in modern times being in a fight or flight situation when you're in a classroom where you're sitting in a podcasting studio is not necessarily useful. So we need to shift that sort of hyperactive state of the nervous system to switching what we call the parasympathetic nervous system on. And it's when we yoga teachers talk about all the time, the parasympathetic nervous system. Ah, cause when that's switched on, then your body goes into this restful mode. It starts to digest food, cognition switches back on. And we know that breath is one of the number one ways that you can literally flip that switch.
Here's the thing though is if you wait until the horse is out of the barn and you're in a truly anxious moment when just like the, you know what has hit the fan, it's kind of a little too late. Unless I would say you're a very experienced yoga practitioner, right? Or have a lot of experience at any breath tradition when you're first starting to train the breath. Probably better to do it at a time when you're a little more relaxed, right? Or if you're a parent, like don't wait until your kid comes off the bus and he's like **panic breathing*** That'd be like, well let's try some deep breathing now. Like it's not a great time. Like I found for me and I don't know for you like resetting my breath and my baseline for anxiety happened in moments when I was not anxious and strengthening that. Then gradually like sort of, I always call it like lowering like the waves. like the waves of anxiety used to go like way up and then way down and way up and way down. In those more down moments when I trained it would pull down the height of the overall wave. So wave, you know, it was kind of just slowly lower the whole thing. It's kind of like strengthening what's already good. Making that stronger makes the other stuff fall away. Did you have an experience like that?
Sarah:
Oh yeah. Through breath. Yeah. I think of it when you pour a can of soda into a glass really, really fast. And you get tons and tons of foam and as the foam kind of recedes and it, and then it, you know, and it ends and it kinda, and then, and then all the foam has gone and it kind of, I don't know, I fit. That's just the way I kind of picture it in my body because I get this whole feeling inside and when I breathe I can slowly just feel it just cool until it's, ah, yes. Ah, yes. And that's
Gita:
Really great point because everyone experiences the breath differently, right? So people, and today when we do some of these, y'all might feel like super anxious, just taking a deep breath. That's normal. Some of you might feel instant relief. That's normal. Some of you might be breathing a lot more shallowly. Is that a word? But more shallow then. Then we direct. That's normal too. Like it's so unique to everybody. The depth of your breath, your experience with the breath, your journey, how it feels is it bubbles. It doesn't matter. It's going to be unique and personal to every single person. So know that about yourself. You don't always have to match what someone else is doing or when we teach you these things, you don't have to match our breath. Uh, you'll be you, you let your breath be be. It's, it's sort of own guide. I think your own breath and body teaches you how to breathe. And so that listening to anxiety, it's kind of the same thing listening to your breath. So if the breath is personal, it's unique to you. That also means you have full, like, I dunno, what would you call it? Permission to stop anytime. Right? Like if you take a deep breath and you get super light-headed, I talk in my yoga class, I'm like, I'll just stop doing that for a minute.
Gita:
No, I can't really, I can, I'm not like a bad student. I can't just relax. Yeah.
It takes time. Right. And to be patient. So anytime when I'm teaching you a breath or Sarah teaches you the breathing ratio, if you get like a little weird, light-headed or even it provokes some anxiety is fine.
Sarah:
Yeah. Just please stop. Yeah. Stop.
Gita:
Please don't make yourself feel worse because that's actually, yeah, good information. to have, it's like, okay, something's happening. Maybe you're dehydrated, you didn't sleep well. It's bringing some stuff up for you that just needs a little time to be processed. Who knows? You just kind of experiment over time and let it gradually work. Um, I don't know. Anything else you want to say about the sciencey stuff before you actually teach us how to take a deep breath?
Sarah:
Yeah, that sounds good. So it's a plan.
Gita:
Yeah, I could go science geek all day. So I will stop that. Yeah. Sarah is going to teach us sort of how to take a deep breath, maybe align us a little bit so we're seated well and then uh, then I'll take over again in a minute, but Sarah take it away. Okay. How to take a deep breath.
Sarah:
Okay. So a lot of this we've already mentioned before. You want to be sure that you're in a comfortable position. Um, if you are driving in the car, stay conscious of the road in front of you, but still kind of get comfortable, kind of, you know, loosen up your shoulders a little bit. You want to try to have your spine as straight as possible. Um, and yeah, and just try to be as calm as possible. Um, if you can, if you're not driving in a car, close your eyes if that's comfortable for you. Sometimes that's not so comfortable, especially when you first begin. Um, this, this whole process of learning how to breathe. And so what you are going to do, you're going to picture your stomach as a balloon you're going to very slowly and steadily as possible. As for you, take a deep breath in through your nose, and as you breathe in, you're going to inflate that balloon all the way until no more air can get into that balloon in your stomach. And then slowly at your own rate. Exhale through your nose and deflate that balloon.
Take another inhale in through your nose, inflate that balloon and exhale through your nose, letting all the air out of the balloon as slowly and steadily as you can. And again, your inhales and exhales will be your own at your own rate, whatever's most comfortable for you. Ideally, you would want to start with at least three to four repetitions of this breath, but you can do as many as you need or as few as you need.
Gita:
I think if we just did this for half an hour, the world would be healed,so that's awesome. So thank you. I feel like I took several Valium and they had instant effect (laughs).
Sarah:
sometimes too, picturing having something to visualize as you're breathing, it's helpful. It can be helpful and obviously it can be anything that works for you might not be a balloon, you know, anything. Having a visual to link with the breath can be helpful.
Gita:
Yeah. Beautiful. That's that one is especially great for kids. I used to be with adults all the time, so to clarify for people also, if you try to take that deep breath and you're like, my abdomen isn't moving at all, you know your lungs fill up with oxygen. Yay. Oh-two we love you. Oh-two. And when that happens, your main muscle of respiration, which is your diaphragm, which attaches at the bottom of your ribs and it goes all the way through to the back. You can picture it like sort of like a big donut, except it doesn't have a whole, what's that a cruller? right there and that muscle, the diaphragm actually pulls down and as it does so it displaces the internal organs. Right. Sweet. Y'all know you're not breathing into your stomach, right? Like that would be odd to put oxygen into your kidneys. So the lungs are in, well actually what happens, the diaphragm pulls down, which creates a vacuum in your lungs, which is really cool.
Gita:
That vacuum actually then the atmosphere itself wants to equalize the pressure. Cause the atmosphere senses that there's a vacuum there and lets allows the air to rush into the lungs, which is kind of cool. We all think that we are breathing in and it's effortful. But actually what's occurring is when your diaphragm pulls down, you're actually making space in the body which creates a vacuum and the atmosphere goes, I must equalize that pressure and just allows the oxygen to rush in. And when that occurs for most of us, as she said, the belly sort of feels like it's inflating or like goes out. That's just your internal organs displacing cause you got that big old crawler of a diaphragm pushing down and "BLUF" everything pushes out. But what of you're sitting there and your belly didn't go out? Interesting. I see this all the time. We've all seen this breath. Don't try this one at home. Just listen. You go like this.
Gita:
If you tell a fifth grader take a deep breath, it's usually what they do. They pull their shoulders up, their chest puffs up in, their belly goes in. I'm taking a deep breath and a lot of my fifth grade students, wow, I feel totally messed up now. A lot of my fifth grade students say, I thought that was taking a deep breath. It's like Whoa. That's actually what we, in yoga parlance and physical therapists would call reverse breathing. And for some of you, if you're a dancer, I see this with cheerleaders, figure skaters, anything where you have to keep your abdomen really tight to do your job and your art form. A lot of times that can constrict that natural ballooning out of the abdomen that Sarah so lovely discussed. So that's normal. If you've trained as a cheerleader, as a dancer, figure skater, they tend to hold themselves really tight here.
Gita:
That's fine, that's awesome. So however, if you're someone who hasn't trained in those modalities and you found like your belly was going in, when you're breathing in, you're just doing a little bit of reverse breathing. There is no problem. There's nothing to worry about. If you slowly and gradually just take a few deep breaths when you wake up in the morning, a few in bed at night, relax, I think is the key to sort of reverse that. Relax. The more you relax, your body will begin to remember how it breathed when you were a baby. Cause I the very few, some preemies are born with some breathing stuff, but most of us are born breathing properly. Most animals, if you have pets at home, when you watch them breathing, their belly goes in and it goes down, it goes in, it goes out, it goes in.
Gita:
So that just be patient with yourself. If you found your belly going in when she was saying "breath out" and you're like this and then you breathe out and everything goes out, Whoa, it's something to notice, right? And just be even more relaxed in your practice. And I'd say just do it laying down maybe. And just over time that reverse breathing will correct itself. And I know you actually, I've had cases in your daughter where you've reversed, breathed and you just patiently let it yes. Kind of normalized just through awareness. Right. Okay. I'll talk more about reverse breathing in a future podcast, but I wanted to give that out there in case some of you are like, Oh wait, my body didn't do that. So Sarah is going to teach us a ratio breath right now. Sure. Yay. I'm so excited. I've never done this. So teach me something new teacher. Right.
Sarah:
So it's very similar to what we just did, but we are going to um, just monitor the time of our inhale and then when, when you have inhaled everything you can, we're going to hold it, hold your breath just for a couple seconds and then you're going to exhale justice slowly. So it's going to be just like we just did with a very slow through your nose, a very slow and steady inhale through your nose. And then we'll hold it for a count. So we'll inhale to a count of four. We'll hold for a count of three and exhale to a count of five. And you can alter that though, any way that's best for you. Maybe you, you can't hold it for as long as I'm counting and that's okay. That's okay. We don't want anybody fainting or getting lightheaded or dizzy. Do to your point of comfort. That's right. Yes. Cool. I'm ready. So again, get yourselves into a comfortable seated position and just sit quietly for a moment and just notice your breath. Breathe in and breathe out. And on your next inhale, you're going to inhale for a count of four. So inhale, one, two, three, four. And now hold your breath for one, two, three. Okay. And exhale slowly and steadily for one, two, three, four, five. Inhale to a count of four. One, two, three, four and hold for a count of three. One, two, three, an exhale for a count of five, one, two, three, four, five
Sarah:
And you can continue this breath for as long as it feels good for you. Notice the difference in the way your body now feels after controlling your breath a little bit, but getting full inhales and full exhales.
Gita:
Do I have to talk now? So amazing thing that that breathing technique does is that it regulates the length of the exhale. And the exhale is the thing that triggers the parasympathetic nervous system. And most people we take a deep breath in and then we never fully exhale, we never fully exhale. That means you never get another full inhale. And so it's like that anxiety piles on top of anxiety and piles on top of anxiety cause you're never actually fully exhaling both symbolically like energy, stress, thoughts, emotions. But also you're not simply replacing and replenishing the oxygen in your body. And so then you wonder why you feel like a little muddled or something like that. They do say when when I was taught this sort of rate, they call it ratio breathing. The exhale should always be try to make it longer than the inhale or what you hold your breath for for that very reason.
Gita
Yeah. And that full exhale then allows you to just take that refresh breath in and that's when you really start to feel the benefits. So as we head towards wrapping up, I want to give people like an idea, like how to practice this. They're like, well great, I just did that breathing and not breathing, but like what do I do in everyday life? I would tell people first thing when you wake up in the morning and you're laying there in bed, notice do exactly what Sarah taught you. People do your homework, notice your breath first, just check out where it's at and then just start with the balloon breath. If that's new for you, once the balloon breath gets comfortable, maybe add the ratio breathing and then do the same thing in bed at night just for a couple of minutes. Yup. It's just for a couple minutes. Anything else or that's it.
Sarah:
And that's the thing that I think makes it most doable for people and it doesn't seem as overwhelming and as a chore, but you, it literally can take 90 seconds for you to reset your feeling of anxiety or you're feeling, you know, just any sort of feeling that you're having inside. Yeah, it can just, it's just like a little reset button. I love it. Boom.
Gita:
Reset with the breath. Yes, and it's amazing too is the benefits accrue over time. Right? So you just, even if you think of it, putting 5 cents in like two minutes of breathing is 5 cents. When I do that every day, over 10 years, you have a lot in your savings bank. You've reduced your overall sort of baseline for stress and anxiety. You've gotten more in tune with your breath, your body, your breathing patterns. You have a critical skill you can use then when you need it and before you need it and improves your overall health because more oxygen is always good for your body.
Sarah:
Yes. And when you feel it in yourself as, as a parent or a teacher or a counselor or a whoever you and once you feel it for yourself, you feel how really good it can feel. You can pass that along to your friends or your kids or anybody else who might benefit from it.
Gita:
You said something crucial there. Practice yourself first before doing this for other people. Just listen to this podcast and then go to your husband. "You know you should really breathe. I'm gonna show you this thing" like practice yourself because then people see the benefits. Then they will ask you and be like, so what are you doing? You seem a little more chill these days and then you can share the information before you go off teaching anyone to breathe. Make sure you can do it yourself first. Practice, practice. Practice yourself first.
Gita:
So my friends, if you listen to this today, we really want to hear about how they're doing, right?
Absolutely. Tell you, hop on over to gitabrown.com Underneath this show you can drop a comment right there. Ask us questions that you have. Let us know challenges, what bubbled up for you? Well, what is confusing? What do you need help with? Like we're both teachers we want to teach you and we can only do that if they talk to us. So drop a comment over at gitabrown.com Let us know how it's going. And more specifically cause you have homework, homework bell. Your homework is to let us know when you're going to practice one or two of these breaths. Either the balloon breath or the ratio breathing, let us know. Are you going to do it? Uh, when you first wake up before bed, are you going to do it both times?
Let us know your plan because by having a plan and us watching you will hold you more accountable than you'll actually do it. And then you'll feel better and you'll overall baseline for stress will go down and your health will improve and everything will be better. And we'll be like so happy because we'll be able to tell when we see them. We like you are glowing. You'll say "it's all that extra oxygen. Thank you." So we're going to close with a chant for peace. Yay. This is a chance for peace that was taught to me by my teachers in the integral yoga tradition. We'll do it in the original Sanskrit first just to give that nice vibration of peace and love. And I'll give you the English translation afterwards. Will you chant with me?
Sarah:
Yes.
Gita:
Thank you Miss Sarah!
Gita & Sarah:
Lokah samastah sukhino bhavantu.
Gita:The chant means "May the entire universe be filled with peace and joy, love and light." Thank you so much, Sarah, for coming on today.!
Sarah:
Thank you for having me!
Gita:
Everybody go out there and breathe. Let us know how it's going over at gitabrown.com We want to see you there. Take a nice deep breath in. Have a peaceful day. My friends, Om Shanti, peace to you.
Gita:
Muisc outro