Do you ever have those moments, when you know you are stressed, and you need to calm down, but you can’t?
Sound familiar, well this week at YogaBears we have been talking about the power of our breath and how it's a skill that you cannot master in a day.
Our bodies are such incredible machines and the normal person will breathe 16 times per minute, which is 960 breaths per hour which is in an incredible 23,040 breaths per day and we do this effortlessly!
When a person joins us to start their Yoga Teacher Training journey, Estelle (the creator of YogaBears) will start by discussing breathing techniques. Estelle begins by inviting the teacher trainees to feel for their breath, this sounds much simpler than it actually is!
What Estelle is starting to do, is to connect that teacher with their breath so that the teacher can begin to understand, how their breath feels, how to breathe into different areas of the body and most critically how to concentrate, on the breath itself.
Now all this sounds super basic stuff, but we promise you it’s not that simple!
Take yourself to your commute to work this morning or this morning’s school run. Did you experience a moment when your heartbeat was accelerated, you were flustered hot and bothered, maybe you were running late or maybe one of the kids forgot their homework? Whatever it may have been, think about how hyped you were and if you can, think about how tense your body felt and how erratic your thoughts were.
Now here’s the interesting part, if a person had magically appeared and told you to take a minute and breathe, could you have done it? Would you have been able to switch all the chaos off and immediately find yourself in a meditative state with just you and your breath?
The point here is that it’s hard! It takes time and energy to practice this skill to enable us to regulate our breath whilst stressed, allowing the fresh oxygenated blood to flow through our bodies, calming our senses.
So, what can we do to help....the answer is practice!
During a YogaBears class, we teach children, the same techniques that Estelle taught us, and we do this every class, every week. We help the children identify their breath and how to control those stressful or excitable situations by concentrating on the breath and feeling it coming in and out of the body.
How do we do this? We do this with our YogaBears, through specially designed techniques to engage the imagination and hold the children's attention long enough for them to reap the amazing rewards this process brings.
It’s not simple, but it can be with practice!
Our hope at YogaBears is if we can teach children at such a young age this skill and control, we will be giving them a tool they can use for life and one that will make them stronger but most importantly calmer.