Find Resilience in Breath

Somatic Inquiry and Skillful Breathing Practices

Breath is life itself. It contains layer upon layer of subtlety and nurturance to body and mind. Are we awake to that experience? Do we feel the refined gifts of life offered with every breath we take? We know that is not always the case. Even in the privileged lives so many of us live, full-body easy breathing is not guaranteed and is not automatic.

We miss a lot when our breath is agitated. We can alter our breathing to positively affect our lived experiences.

We are alive in stressful times and these troubled times affect our breath. In turn, our breathing affects everything about how we feel and our ability to be effective in our lives. In these times we are called upon to act with strength and clarity within ourselves and in our communities. We are called upon to take strong action, to be persistent, and to come from a place of balance and equanimity.

Equanimity and balance are functions of complex interactions within our nervous systems. How we breathe affects our nervous system, and our nervous system affects our breathing.

Support Precedes Action. The quality of our own breathing is critical to finding the stability within our lives that is imperative for providing support for all we need to do. Good support precedes effective action. Skillfully approached yoga breathing techniques offer extensive means for balancing and toning the nervous system. We want and need to experience inner comfort and stability. We need that inner stability to create the foundation for strength and clarity in our actions.

There is an art to breathing. Yes, a so called “natural breath” is probably a good idea. But what is a natural breath? Learning to breathe fully, with ease and comfort is a multilayered process. In yoga, we call this process pranayama. For pranayama (for all breathing techniques, for that matter) to be effective they require skill.

What does deep breathing mean? How do we do it?
In Embodyoga we explore layer upon layer of breath and its inner movement. Yoga techniques along with important embodied-somatic underpinnings are key tools for our practice. We use Embodied-Inquiry to delve into subtle layers consciousness and form.

Our breath becomes a whole body experience, from cellular breathing to the movement of air in and out of our lungs. We learn to open to direct experience of inner breath manifesting through all its layers of subtlety and power. Each step in the process is important. Each process deserves focused attention. And each layer reveals more depth and subtlety. Inner comfort and ease increases incrementally as we attend to practice.

With a sign of relief, we can relax—we can see, think, and feel more clearly.

For most of us learning to breathe with ease and depth is a developmental process. Just bouncing around from technique to technique may be helpful in the moment, but to really reset our every day breathing we require knowledge, an informed step-by-step process, and a delicate touch.

Ease and comfort are foundational to full breathing. Ultimately, we learn to honor the breath – not to “control it”. Eventually, as part of the process, and right from the beginning we learn skillful means to drop the control. Excessive control is hardening and counter to the natural blooming of breath.

This is not your every day breathing program. We lay out an easeful and solid foundations for experiencing the sensuality and nurturance of breath in the body. We seamlessly bend a somatic and fully embodied approach to familiar breathing techniques.

The process itself is accessible and easy! Patience and practice are required.