BreathWise: Recent Episodes
Alexandra Howson PhD
Breathing science. Breath awareness.
Get wise to the power of your own breath to boost energy, cultivate calm, and build balance. Includes a weekly round up of research into the power of breathing and a practical breath awareness practice for your health and wellbeing toolkit.
This combined visualization and breath practice is a way to slow the exhale without having to think about it too much. Any time you create resistance with your mouth or nose, your exhale will be slower than usual. And slow exhales help to stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system—telling your heart rate to slow and your brain to relax.
Find a comfortable seat, cup your hands around something delicious and hot you like to drink, and let's get started.
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We hold tension in different parts of the body as a response to stress. Over time, without conscious relaxation, these holding patterns may contribute to stress-related headaches, low back pain, cardiovascular disorders, gut issues. This practice focuses on particular musculoskeletal areas in which we often hold tension. We focus on these areas, breathe, and create spacious awareness. Notice your responses, sensations, emotions.
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Slow, deep (diaphragmatic) breathing is a helpful tool to cultivate a return to calm when we feel irritable, anxious, or disconnected from ourselves and others. This is a grounding practice that uses color visualization combined with breath awareness to cultivate energy and connection with self and others.
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This practice uses three different types of breath combined with movement of the arms and hands to energize and soften the body and mind.
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Breathing out through your mouth and throwing your fingers forward as though you're throwing water off your fingers on the exhale.
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Ocean breath
3. Breathing up and down your spine.
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On days when you are feeling scattered or fractious, breath awareness can be a powerful tool to cultivate a sense of deep peace. Practice this 3-part breath to clear out the clutter. This dirga pranayama focuses on expanding breath into the belly, ribcage, and collar bones in a stepwise fashion. I'll guide you through the practice, which ends with a version of a celtic blessing.
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This breath awareness meditation invites us to practice anchoring ourselves to the breath. In doing so, we leave aside any practice of looking either to the future or the past, and practice staying in the present moment by following the sensation, quality, and texture of the breath.
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This body scan relaxation focuses attention on your pulse. We start by cultivating an even breath, which increases the elasticity of your blood vessels and amplifies your pulse wave. As the blood vessel walls become more elastic they expand out a little more with each pulse, becoming a little more palpable.
This awareness takes practice. So if you find it difficult to discern a pulse in the different parts of the body we rotate through, don't worry about. Just direct your attention to the different parts of your body even if the pulse isn't discernible.
The act of directing your attention enhances the relaxing effect of the scan.
When you are ready, lie down and make yourself comfortable.
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