07/05/2024
Today your breath guides your movement.
Tomorrow your movement guides your breath.
When you first get practicing various arts, often you are told to link the movements to match your exhale and inhalation rhythms.
However as time goes on and the movements change, we learn how to move in ways which contract or expand the lungs as the body and movements become unified. Of course from a physiological point of view it was the chest moving the lungs and the rest of the body moving on that rhythm. However as we go on and become more aware, we can develop the chest movement to lead the others.
Equally, while in yoga nidra sessions we are told to feel ourselves breathing into our feet. Which of course isn't completely realistic from a litteral sense as the oxygen isn't filling up into everywhere, it still only reaches the bottom of the lungs. What does happen though are the muscle chains that are used to open the body and the lungs can work more.
As youre sitting or standing, scrunch each toe up individually while relaxing and feel how these movements adjusts the chest, now repeat that with individually clench each finger to a fist. Again allow yourself to feel the impact this has on the chest and other aspects of the body.
So what is actually meant by breathing into our feet is not the air going to our feet but instead using all the muscles in the body to initiate the contraction and expansion of the chest, which is how it fills with air.
There can be many physiological benefits to this as well of course to the psychological and emotional releases. One is that the nerves in the feet are the furthest away from the brain so it can engage the biggest part of the nervous system and one often forgotten, in day to day trivial life. The lymphatic system is pumped by muscular movements so these gentle movements of the whole body contracting and expanding can help to pump it. Similarly the small tensing and relaxing of muscles allows for blood to be needed and used, so it will be getting replenished easier.
Another but definitely not the last benefit, is that I brings awareness to the smaller less used muscles within the body. This allows us to not just feel them as tensed or untensed, instead the levels of tension within them and awareness of what it feels like and how to relax them.
Of course this isn't going to be a one time hit to be fully aware and able to do this instead will come from practice and feeling what's happening not trying to think or force it to happen.
