Welcome to Week One of the How to Breathe Immersion.
I am grateful you are here and I look forward to practicing with you for the next five weeks.
For those of you who have been considering joining us, it’s not too late, you can upgrade your subscription today.
A few important notes before we get started—
Please save the date for our live group session on July 24, 2024 @ 9-9:45am PST (Zoom link will be sent out in the coming weeks)
Weekly immersion emails will land in your inbox on Wednesdays at 11:00am PT
To get the most from this immersion I suggest setting aside 10 minutes to practice the audio sessions a few times a week (with grace and spaciousness of course!)
To listen to the immersion audio sessions and join our conversations from your phone, download the Substack app
Now, let’s jump in…
Setting An Intention
We begin by connecting to our intentions for this immersion. Intentions are like North Stars, guideposts to help us organize our nervous systems toward what we want most for ourselves. Without this aim and reference guide, our practice sessions can lack containment and stability.
Setting an intention will help set the tone for this immersion and keep us connected to why we are practicing. This is important when things get tough in your life or practice, as they invariably will from time to time. When life gets full, the energy we have for our breathwork practice can start to wane.
Take a moment right now to think about what you want to receive from this immersion. Below are a few prompts to get you started.
What do you hope this will bring into your life?
What do you want for yourself right now?
What do you want to embody?
As you explore these inquiries, notice your breath.
Does your breath feel deep and slow? Shallow and quick? Are you struggling to get any sense of your breath at all?
This is an invitation to begin connecting your desire to be in this immersion with your breath. There are no right or wrong answers.
Until I started practicing breathwork, I never paid any attention to how my intentions relate to my breath or feel in my body. As it turns out, the more spaciousness and aliveness we feel in our breath and body as we set our intentions, the more potent they will become. This potency is part of how we stay committed to our intentions when life comes up against our practice.
An intention is more than a goal. It’s what makes you feel alive and vital. Intentions are part getting clear on what you want, part casting a vision for who you want to become, and part making a commitment to yourself.
This week, I invite you to get clear on your main intention for this immersion. Below is a brief guide to get you started—
Write your intentions down on paper and sit with each one.
Say them out loud and let your body guide you.
As you read them, choose the intention that makes you feel the most alive, a little excited, and perhaps a tiny bit nervous.
Write this intention down in a few places where you will see it often, your journal, as a note on your phone, perhaps as a post-it on your bathroom mirror.
If you have a copy of How to Breathe you are welcome to read pages 25-27 for a deeper understanding of setting intentions.
Breathwork Practice: Orienting
To kick off the official breathing session in our immersion, we will begin with a simple orienting exercise. This 10 minute guided session is based on a nervous system processing practice I learned in my somatic training. I’ve added a gentle breathing element to this practice to further increase nervous system awareness and settling.
It is a natural process for animals and humans to scan our environment for safety. As we engage with our environment, our bodies begin to respond to these types of questions: Is it safe to hang out here? Eat here? Sleep here? Will I need to run? Should I get prepared to run? This mapping registers in our nervous systems in milliseconds, at an unconscious level.
The purpose of the Orienting practice is to support our nervous systems to establish a relative amount of safety. This safety will help us connect to our breath with more awareness and to our bodies with more compassion.
You may try this Orienting session as often as you like to strengthen self-regulation. You may also use this session when you feel overwhelmed and want to cultivate stability or a greater sense of self-presence.