Jenna Zaffino:
Hi everyone, I'm Jenna. Welcome to your expanded breathing session. Now as with any breath work practice, it's important to check-in with your health care provider before trying things that are new or expansive or intended to enhance your breathing. However, I also want to encourage you to be your own guide within this exercise. And in the event that it feels like it brings on any undue stress or restriction, things that don't feel helpful for you, then you can choose a different one or a different, session altogether. So remember to check-in with your doctor and also make the choices as you experience this exercise. So this one is called the breathing clock, and it's intended to just encourage our breathing apparatus to find more space and perhaps a little bit of muscular endurance as we breathe. Often, as we've talked about in other sessions, when we're breathing, we have an expanded, I'm exaggerating, movement of our rib cage out to the side, into the front and back, and then our diaphragm goes down with our inhale and up with our exhale.
So we wanna just embody a sense of getting bigger as we divide our inhalations into smaller pieces and then becoming really connected as we exhale. So I'm gonna show you first so you get a sense of what we're going to do. And today, we're gonna work between the numbers of 1 and 6. Now this is an abstract clock, so go with me on this on this one because we won't get all the way up to, to 12 today. So our arms are gonna hang down by your sides and we wanna start out with our shoulders back and down, neck nice and long, and a seated posture that feels like you're creating space in your trunk and your torso. And to begin, we're just going to take one breath in and one breath out. We'll breathe in through the nose. And then when you breathe out, think shh, making a little shushing sound.
Shh. If that sound doesn't work for you, feel free to choose however you'd like to breathe in and out. Breathing in. Breathing out. One more breathing in and breathing out. Alright. So we're gonna think about our in breath and our out breath. We're gonna try to divide it into twos, threes, fours, fives, and maybe even sixes.
It is not uncommon at the beginning of this exercise to only get to 2 or 3. And I'll give you a little helpful hint. But just so you know what it looks like, let's try threes. So we'll go. Okay. Now here's the trick. Let's take the example that one breath in moves your lungs, your ribs, everything out this much. When we take a 3 count breath, instead of breathing in and then kind of running into some resistance on the outside, 2, 3, We're gonna breathe in 1, a little more, a little more, and then out, out, out.
When we move to 4, we might breathe in, in, in, in, maybe a little wider and out, out, out, out. So think about parsing your breath out into equal parts, not breathing in all of the air on the first breath unless you need to, but thinking about just opening up a little bit more each time. Now, again, this is an exercise. And as with all of us, if an exercise isn't helping our body respond to it with a positive sense of curiosity and feeling good about what you're doing, then it might not be the exercise for you today. But I wanted to include it in our library so that we had it in case you're ready for a little more expanded breath work. Alright. So as we begin, let's roll your shoulders down and back and we'll start just with an inhale and exhale. Let's go for 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
And then take one breath, and exhale. Alright. In the event that you feel a little light headed, I will also say that's not uncommon because sometimes that exercise can help us take in more oxygen than we are used to. And, again, if you only got to 2 or 3 or 4, then you did something today, and that's wonderful. It's not necessary to get to 6 or 12 or any of it. The the purpose is to explore what's there for you in those various numbers. So I'll invite you to do it with me one more time. And if you just wanna walk watch along at this point, that's okay too.
The purpose again is to just build a little endurance in our breathing and put our focus on those numbers. So let's get ready, and when you're ready we'll take 1 inhale, 1 exhale. And 2, 34, 5, 6, 5. 4, 3, 2, 1. Alright. Let's roll your shoulders back a little bit. Again, if you feel a little bit of light headedness, just breathe normally. Let your breaths be a little more shallow and take your time with the breathing.
Just notice how you feel. Again, we're always looking at these exercises as opportunities to learn a little bit more about our breathing apparatus and not to judge the way we're breathing because you are strong, resilient, and the small breathing moments matter. So I will encourage you, if this one felt great for you, come back to it. And if it didn't, that's okay. You can always, in these libraries, take what you need and leave the rest. I hope this helped you explore your breathing today, and I will look forward to seeing you very soon.
