Breath

Hi there, Sarah. Berta cellie here. Welcome to the daily dose. Day One. Today the focus is breath. I often say we're breathing and moving and we should be doing that throughout everything we do all the time. Today we focus on Mat, class, and breath. Let's begin. Start with your legs out in front of you. Straight bent diamond shape in a way that it feels quite comfortable for you to sit. Lengthen your spine and breathe.

I invite you to close your eyes and take three breaths. Inhale deeply and exhale completely. As you inhale, think of growing just a little taller through your spine and as you exhale, grow taller still, and just one more breath like that. Lengthening your spine with the inhale. Okay, and exhale completely lengthening just a little more.

Awaken your eyes and settle into your pelvis. Try to feel that both sides of your pelvis is equally weighted. Make sure that you're sitting in a way that allows you to roll back, holding onto your legs, pulling yourself up, perhaps just a little taller with your upper back and your arms with an exhale round through your back. Close your legs toward one another and lean back a little bit here. Trying the abdominals active. Inhale here.

Use An exhale to round, back up. Sit Tall. Allow the legs to open. Lifting your heart. Use An exhale to round back, deepening the flection of your spine. Inhale back here. Use An exhale to round up and an inhale to lift. Just a little higher. Just one more like that. Explore the movement. This is about self care. This is about you enjoying how the movement feels. Enjoying each and every breath you take.

Take your legs back to center, holding onto your legs. Use An exhale to peel back, and this time we go all the way back. Slide your feet really close to your bottom. Here are comfortably close. I should stay. And then lower your head down. Settle your body on your mat, preparing for your pelvic curl. Engage your abdominals with an exhale, moving your pelvis, and then lift yourself up through that pelvic curl. Articulating through each and every vertebra. Inhale here.

Use The exhale to lengthen through your spine, lowering down one vertebra at a time. Remember, breathing and moving. Inhale, exhale. Abdominals first. Lift the pelvis up second, using the backs of the legs, feeling the inner size. Inhale at the top and exhale to peel down, articulating through your spine. One Vertebrae at a time. Inhale, you use an exhale to peel up here, holding this lifted position for an extra breath. See if you can lengthen your spine a little bit more. Feel that yourself holding on to an imaginary ball between your legs and then lower down and with the next pelvic curl will hold even a little longer.

Inhale, breathing and moving. Exhale to peel up. We hold this beautiful lifted position. Feeling the openness through the front of your legs, pressing through your arms for a little more height. Lift your heels with an inhale. Press your heels flat and try to lift your pelvis just a bit higher.

Do that again. Lift your heels. Use An exhale to press down and one more breath like that. Press the pelvis down or I'm sorry. Press the feet down. Lifting the pelvis up. Use the next sail to lower down one vertebra at a time. Float your arms up to the ceiling. Inhale, opening the arms wide, stretching through the front of the body. Exhale to lift up. Again, breathing and moving in. Helen completely, and exhale.

One more breath here, holding the arms wide, place them down on the mat or the floor and stretch a little wider. Allow your legs to just melt to the front of the room. Nice and luxurious is the exhale to pull back to center and then go the other way. Notice that I like to move my legs a bit here, meaning I'm moving my thigh bones in my hip joint to release the hips and then the spine and then we use the abdominals to pull back to center. Finding that center position. Just one more like that. Nice and relaxed on the way over and engaged on the way back.

Now we engaged the whole time, so lift one leg to table top and then the other. Squeezing those legs together. Inhale toward me perhaps and use the exhale to pull back to center. Be Mindful that your arms are anchored down even more than your arms being anchored down. Can you pay attention to your shoulder blades? It's an inhale to twist to one direction and an exhale to pull back.

Paying attention to not arching your back to using your abdominals to pull back and to keep your abdominals engaged the entire time. Just one more each direction. Inhaling to twist. Exhale to pull back. And last one we pull back to center and we hold. Hug those legs deep into your chest.

Perhaps even lift your head and attempt to make a forehead to knee connection. Lower down. Find tabletop with your legs. Reach your hands to the ceiling. Take your arms behind you, but keep your rib cage down, your abdominals engaged. With an exhale. We lift head and chest. And with an inhale we lower down.

Now anybody who finds it difficult to keep the legs up, you can always modify in this course and anywhere on PyLadies new time you could put your feet down if you needed to. But here I'm going to choose to keep my legs up on the next one. We're going to lift, hold and breathe. So stay here. Inhaling. Okay. And exhaling, inhaling and exhaling. So this is a hundreds prep.

Inhaling for five counts and exhaling for five counts without the pump of the arm and inhaling for five counts and exhaling for five counts. Inhaling, the goal is to do 10 breath and exhaling, okay, and inhale, think of lifting higher when you inhale and exhale. And let's call one more breath here. Exhale all the air out, pull your legs into you. Lift your pelvis up and create this nice little rocking shape so you're in a rounded back and see if you can get yourself to rock and roll massaging your spine until you find yourself upright. Perhaps here, try to make a forehead to knee connection. Okay.

And then sit tall. Stretch your legs out in front of you. If you know you have a tight low back, feel free to put a towel behind your spine here or behind your pelvis here, which will make it just a little easier to roll up. I'm going to see what happens and hopefully manage without it today. So sitting nice and tall on your sits bones, round through your spine. First. Use the exhale to peel back another modification for anyone who might need it would be to bend the knees. That would always be okay. Send the arms overhead, lift the head and chest, and we roll ourselves up to a sitting position holding this rounded spine arms energized forward. Inhale, use an exhale to peel back.

Now I'm making a conscious choice to separate my legs. It makes it just a little easier for me to roll through my back. Feel free to dry years together. Using your breath. We roll up, oh here, we'll do a couple more like that. Exhaling to peel back. Use an inhale to lift and an exhale to round all the way up and just one more roll up here. Okay.

Roll-Up for me is the single most challenging exercise. It always is. I'm grateful that I can do it. Some days I have a hard time and some days it feels doable. Oftentimes when I'm talking, it's that much harder fun challenge. I say, scooch forward a bit on your mat, round back through your spine, and create a ball shape. Toes touching here, fully engaged in your abs before you even lift a leg up. So try lifting one foot up. Keep that position as you lift the other leg up, glue your legs together, and then bring your legs as close to you as you can.

Maintaining the abdominal connection. Then just lightly hold with your hands. Rolling like a ball. Here we go. Okay. Ooh. Hopefully you can balance without using your toes. Inhale and exhale. Gosh, try not to go all the way back to your head and see if you can find that nice fluid rolling and the ease of balance. Remember, this is [inaudible] practice, so not everything is perfect all the time and we have to live in our bodies where we are and enjoy the moment. Hold here.

Shins come parallel to the ceiling. Hold the backs of the legs and sit tall or lengthen your spine. Really, here we actually to round back to the chest lift position. Legs come into tabletop, reach above the knees are beyond the knees. Single leg. Stretch one leg out, one leg in. Use your arms. Don't be shy and shake and shake.

Let's eat. Hey accent in. Yeah, and excellent. Now for anyone with this is too difficult to have the leg out to straight modify. You could put a foot down or you could keep your knees bent. You could just change arms side to side without straightening your leg all the way. Whatever works for you. Two legs come in hold, slip your hands behind your head and we twist one side and we che, we stay lifted. As we pass through center. We try to keep lifting energetically on the diagonal forward each time, so it's like I'm lifting in the direction of that bent knee. One more each side. Please draw your two legs in, round through your back and again, find that beautiful rocking and rolling on your low spine until you find that it's easy to make your way up right.

Put your feet on the front corners of your mat, scoop any flush out that needs scooping and send your arms straight out in front of you. Spine stretch feeder flex if possible. Inhale here. Use An exhale to peel forward one vertebrae at a time. Allow the arms to continue traveling forward with that rounded back to maximize that spine and hamstring stretch. Use An exhale to round and roll yourself all the way back up. Breathing in, moving. Inhale. Exhale, peeling forward, articulating through your spine [inaudible] and use an exhale to round and roll all the way back at.

Think about a couple of things for me here. Do you feel that you're sitting equally on both of your sits bones throughout the entire movement? So even as you shift forward, you should feel that both legs are weighted equally? One of the things that I think about while I'm here is this idea of energetically deriving my legs down into the mat, which helps to wake up the back of my legs a little bit and helps me to support this position and stretch a little deeper. Hold here, clasp your fingers together. Place your hands behind your head. Keep your legs like this, and twist, keeping both sitz bones equally weighted and unwind and TUI and unwind. One more like that. Think of pushing your head into your hands, creating just a little bit of um, lengthening through your neck.

So really working that breathing differently with an exhale two times one, two and one two. Remember the movements that we do all the time and especially in this course should be with pleasure. So if something doesn't feel good changes. So it does. I want you to really adhere to the pleasure principle. Yes, have fun, enjoy movement should be yummy. Last one. And we rest that across your legs, out in front of you and move back a bit on your mat. If this transition doesn't work, you'll find another one.

Roll over your legs if it suits you and come to your hands and to your knees. So with your hands underneath your shoulders and your knees underneath your hips, feel your spine long and feel this idea of lifting up through the back of your heart while keeping your abdominals engaged. Okay. Here, I'm going to let you change the gaze of your, of your a, change your gaze, moving your neck a little bit while rounding through the low back. I want you to avoid pushing all the way up with your arms here. So we're keeping the upper back somewhat contained. Come back to center. Do that again.

You're going to round through the low back and allow your head to respond to that. That's the way I should've said it the first time. And then come back through and just one more time round and come back through holding your plank position. Slide one foot back and energetically go into a little bit of a posterior tilt in your mind just to make sure you're not anterior here. That means pubic bone forward. Send the other leg back and be in your plank position. Breathing.

So even though we're in a powerful position, find the ease here. Find the pleasure of being here. Feel energy through the backs of the legs, through the crown of the head. Take one knee in to graze the floor and go back the other knee into graze and back again. Breathing and moving. You choose the breath here. I generally use an exhale followed by an inhale. Exhale. Just one more time. Each side that his two legs are straight.

We're going to lower ourselves all the way down through push up position if that suits you and set up for our single leg kick here. So take your hands just outside of your shoulders. First with your elbows down, feel yourself gently pulling forward through the crown of the head and lifting up a little bit. But keep those low ribs connected for now. Lower down. Just do that two more times before we add on. We're going to inhale, pull forward, open through the heart. It's not about lifting, it's about moving forward and down. One more time. We lift and we hold here. Good. Now take one hand out in front of you. Take the other handout in front of you, clasp the fingers together.

Use your arms, your hands specifically to drive down into the mat and perhaps pull forward just a bit more. Really energizing this upper back, this Spinks position, however, your two legs and we bend one knee with two little pulses and then the other leg, two little pulses. And now we breathe in. Inhale, exhale, exhale. Keep the breathing. Okay. Okay. [inaudible] so while you continue to breathe through this, feel the fluidity of the kicking. The pumping is very gentle. It's very soft. Lengthening through the crown of the head, energized through the core, feeling those backs of the legs. Working quite, quite rigidly here. Rigidly, maybe not the right word, but pretty seriously, right? Two legs.

Go to straight and gently rest that bring your hands underneath your shoulders and using your abs to support. Push yourself back into a quick child's pose here or rest pose. Breathing in and breathing out. So now slide yourself into a sideline position on your elbow here, two straight legs if possible. And find a place where you can maximize your external rotation.

That means your hand is going to go back in space or away from your view, if you will. So I'm going to go right here. I'm going to press down through my hand and really energized through my core here. Feel free to use this other hand to support or lift it up and challenge yourself. So we're going to lift the top leg up and we go forward with a pulse and back with a false, a false whore pulse. How about we take whatever breadth suits you, but generally I'll take an inhale back and an exhale forward. Now press into that hand so much that you almost unweight the elbow.

Just think about it. I'm not actually lifting it, but I want you to think about it. Yeah. So we'll take this just one more time. The leg goes back, you stay, push into the hand so much that you unweight the elbow. Okay. And bending come down to more like that. We're going to unweight the elbow and we bend down and we unweight the elbow and we bend down. We have our two knees in.

Take a quick stretch and onto the second side. So once again, you're going to set up on your elbow, maximize your outward rotation please here so that the hand is going back in space. Feel the pressing through the hand, the energy through the core hand here. If needed, lift the leg up and we flex forward and we inhale back. Exhale and inhale. Breathing and moving the luxury of breath. Pay attention to it. It helps us so much. Nice.

So I am flexing the foot forward and pointing it back. Very engaged. We hold here. Now take your arm out to the side. Push into that hand and see, oh, I almost didn't have it there. Friends. Here we go and we lower down. It's okay. This is real time. Lift up and we lower down. And one more time.

Lift up. Woo. I did not expect it to be so much harder on that side today. Give your legs a little in. Ah, and we make our way to our bellies for some back extensions. So he just go ahead and get there. How it's easiest for you in this moment. Stretch your two arms overhead. Your legs are straight, neutral alignment with the legs, meaning it feels like we're turning in probably a lot of us. However, your arms hover your head and have, or your legs.

I want you to feel your chest heavy, your belly light, your pelvis heavy. Think about that. Chest heavy, belly light, pelvis heavy. So one arm and the opposite leg lifts and we change and we change. Nice and slow breathing. Find the breath that suits you. This is just a preparation for the swimming here.

Really working on that cross patterning. Okay, one more time here. And then bring your hands underneath your shoulders. Push yourselves back to a rest pose. Okay, so from here, shift to your hands and knees. Tuck your toes under. Push your bottom up and walk your feet toward your hands.

Let your head dangle for a moment. Take a breath and then slowly roll yourself up to a standing position. Feel free to bend the knees if that's better for you. [inaudible] stand with your head stacked or your head length through the crown of the head and all your pieces stacked. But light. Take a breath in. Lifting your arms high, look up and take a breath out.

Taking your arms down and let's finish with a couple breaths together in how the hands come down and exhale up, ah, in how the hands representing the diaphragm down. Exhale up. Ah, two more. Growing Taller with your exhale. One more breath. Allow your body to soften.

Thanks so much for playing and breathing with me today.