Imagine if you could enhance your relationships, manage your emotions, and start the new year with a fresh perspective, all by harnessing the power of your breath? Sounds interesting, doesn’t it? I am so excited to continue to share my belief in this modality, especially in how it can help your relationships.
We spend too much time talking, and should spend more time breathing!.
Tune in to learn five different ways breathwork (Reset and beyond) can greatly impact your relationships.
And before it's too late, sign up to experience your own breakthrough. I am hosting a virtual breathwork class from the comfort of your own home. It will be on December 7th @7:30pm EST.
Register Here
Let's Connect.
Free guide: 5 ways to find Calm: Get the guide here
Come find me on Instagram: @findherwildcoaching
Check out my website and my offerings here
Imagine if you could enhance your relationships, manage your emotions, and start the new year with a fresh perspective, all by harnessing the power of your breath? Sounds interesting, doesn’t it? I am so excited to continue to share my belief in this modality, especially in how it can help your relationships.
We spend too much time talking, and should spend more time breathing!.
Tune in to learn five different ways breathwork (Reset and beyond) can greatly impact your relationships.
And before it's too late, sign up to experience your own breakthrough. I am hosting a virtual breathwork class from the comfort of your own home. It will be on December 7th @7:30pm EST.
Register Here
Let's Connect.
Free guide: 5 ways to find Calm: Get the guide here
Come find me on Instagram: @findherwildcoaching
Check out my website and my offerings here
Hello and welcome to Wake Up and Thrive. My name is Bridget and I'm your host. My intention for this space is to help women around the world live more awake, aligned and truly alive. I believe wholeheartedly that we are designed to live, feel and experience the full range that life has to offer, and in doing so, we can live fully turned on in all areas. My story began with sobriety and has since been an initiation into rediscovering parts of myself that I forgot about or had abandoned. Learning to reclaim all of who I am has been the greatest gift of living awake, and together we will go on a journey of helping you to do the same. You can expect to learn practical tools to help you connect deeper to yourself, your purpose and those in your life. All you need is an open heart and an open mind. So if you're ready, it's time. It's time to wake up and thrive. Hello, welcome back to Wake Up and Thrive. My name is Bridget and I'm your host, and I hope you guys are staying warm.
Speaker 1:We definitely have a cold front coming through where I live and I keep hearing I'm on the East Coast in the US. I have to say US because I just saw I have quite a few listeners actually in South Wales, australia. So if you're listening, holler, holler, but yeah, no, we have this big cold front and are supposed to have this huge like lots of snow, snowy winter, cold winter, all the things. And I'm feeling that, as far as like wanting to hibernate, I'm feeling that need to just unplug, remove a bunch of things in my life, in my business, in my relationships, that are just not lighting me up, that I are just not almost like bringing energy, like yes, we need to bring our energy to our life and kind of like create that momentum. But I also think there are things in our life that can bring or drain our energy and I'm noticing, especially during this like cold hibernation season, there's a lot of things that are just no longer working. That worked when I started in this space, when I started on Instagram, when I started my podcast two years ago. There's a lot that are no longer serving who I am today, and that's okay when I started this podcast, one of my first episodes.
Speaker 1:As I said, I will continue to show up here as long as it is fun and as long as I am feeling lit up, and I feel that sometimes and then there's sometimes I want to just tear everything down, not to like quit and walk away, but tear everything down and just rebuild. I don't know if any of you guys can relate to that, because I'm not the same person I was when I started the name of my podcast, the name of my business, how I serve women. I have really evolved and so, naturally, my business needs to evolve. So, that being said, you can expect me to show up here this week and then I have two more episodes coming out and then I will be going offline until January 10. So, that being said, I am really going to be taking this time to reflect on where this or how this space fits into, where I want to go in my business and how I want to serve and show up, and I encourage all of you guys to be doing that.
Speaker 1:If you do nothing else at the end of a new year, most of the time, we're just so focused on the holiday stresses and the craziness. But evaluate, evaluate, look at your calendar, look at your phone, look at, just think back to where your time and energy has been going and, first of all, see has it really been moving the needle forward to where you want to go and if it hasn't, you get to really choose. That's the beauty. Like we're not victims to our life, I'm not stuck in this podcasting world, like I get to choose at any time I can choose to pivot. And I'm just in this space now and I know I've sort of said this before, but I mean it Like 2024 is a year of new action. It's a year of me consciously choosing to show up differently because I want different results.
Speaker 1:And if I'm going to be completely transparent which heck I have been up until this point I would rather be sitting in a room with you ladies, even men, if you're listening. I would rather be sitting in a room, speaking on a stage, leading a retreat, leading a live workshop, getting up and dancing with you that's what lights my heart on fire. Sitting behind a computer screen, talking to a mic, literally just seeing my reflection. Oh, it's not really doing it for me these days. So you have my commitment to be showing up for the next this week and then two more weeks, two more really good episodes, all about relationships, and, yeah, that's my commitment.
Speaker 1:My ask for you guys is, if you can, you can choose to listen to a thousand different podcasts, but you're choosing to listen to mine and I want you to know how unbelievably grateful I am for you and my ask is that you would rate the podcast, that you would leave a review, that you would share it with a friend, that you would email me and let me know what's resonating or what you would love to learn more about. All of that it helps me. It doesn't just help my ego, it really helps my soul know, okay, this is the direction I need to go, or okay, this just isn't reaching the community that I want it to be reaching, right, and that's okay, that's it, that's not a problem. So that's my commitment. You can expect January 10th I will pop back in here to let you know, like the sort of where this podcast is going. But yeah, I just I believe in full transparency and that's where I'm sitting at, that's where I've been sitting at for a while now. I think I'm just now at this place where I'm really starting to honor it, that I need to see a shift in this space as far as how I feel and the impact that I'm seeing it make, and if I'm not seeing one or two of those shift, then it's time for me to close the door on Wake Up and Thrive, and that doesn't necessarily mean forever, but, yeah, it's time to start honoring. I've always been told I'm a permission slip, right? So I want to embody what it is that I'm encouraging you guys to do.
Speaker 1:So, as you guys wrap up 2023, can you pick one thing that you? Maybe it's a story, maybe it's an emotional addiction, right? Some of us can be addicted to anxiety or anger or resentment. Maybe it's something you do in your health, maybe it is something you're doing in your business, or it's something you it's a dream you've had and you just keep putting it off. Can you decide today? Decide today, like no more, I'm not going to come to the end of 2024 and be feeling this exact same way. It's like it's it's time to do something different, and that doesn't require just changing your mind or whatever. It requires taking action, taking an aligned action towards where you want to go. So that's what I am planning to do, that's what I want to encourage you guys to plan to do.
Speaker 1:And yeah, with that being said, we're going to jump into this week's podcast episode, which is a play off of last week's, where I really introduced the reset breath work. Today I want to talk about how breath work in general, but specifically the reset breath work, how that can make an impact in your relationships, because I've watched it make an impact in mind. Okay, so, with that being said, I would love you to just pause and take a moment right now and notice how you're breathing. Don't try to change any of it, but just notice is. Is your belly moving, or your chest when you inhale? Is your belly going out and expanding, whereas your chest and shoulders going up? Many of us breathe into our chest, which is actually just a shallow breath, and it is how many of us show up when we are angry, stressed, anxious, overwhelmed.
Speaker 1:Right, our breath can tell us a lot about our experience. Are you breathing slow? Are you breathing fast? Are you holding your breath Right? Maybe you're sitting in traffic and you're like, oh, like, whatever it is for you. Can you just take this moment to just notice? Because our breath, you guys, is the first and the last thing we will ever do in this world. Right, when we're born, we take a breath. When we leave this earth, we take our last breath. Isn't that powerful Like? It literally can give and take away life, and it is something we all have access to all of us, and it's unbelievable unbelievable the amount of power your breath can have on your entire experience.
Speaker 1:Okay, so let's talk about how breathwork can impact your relationships. And the first impact that it can have is it can increase your capacity to hold more experiences, more of your own experience, but also more of other people's experience. So, quite literally, like specifically when we do the reset breathwork, we are working so much with that diaphragm, like we're doing diaphragmatic breathing, which most of us do not do. So, quite literally, we're strengthening the diaphragm muscle, and it's one of the biggest muscles in our body and as you strengthen it, it takes in more air. So, quite literally and physically, physiologically, you're increasing your lung capacity, right, but energetically, what you're also doing is you're creating. So, if you just think of physiologically, like, okay, I'm increasing my lung capacity to hold more air, think of the air as also clearing out everything that's crowding your judgment, that's crowding your perception, that's crowding your reaction time, as you start to use the breath to sort of clear all of that out, as you sort of use the breath to reset your nervous system, you will feel increased capacity. So, like, what does that look like For me. What it looks like is I and I've talked about this before, but I would go from like feeling fine to freaking level 10 of overwhelm, anger, irritation, and I didn't, I couldn't, I couldn't feel it in my body.
Speaker 1:All I knew was that, generally speaking, I was overwhelmed and it was coming out in a really destructive way, and there wasn't any room for how my husband was feeling. There wasn't any room for what was going on with my kids. I was quite literally all I could focus on was the overwhelm in my body and it felt like it was consuming my whole body. Since I've been doing breath work, since I've specifically been taking myself to that peak activating state, like you do in the reset, and then, in a very safe and non-destructive way, discharging the emotions instead of yelling and freaking out on the people around me as I like, safely and non-destructively discharge it. What actually happened?
Speaker 1:Because it's not a problem that you feel overwhelmed, it's not a problem that you feel stressed. The problem is what we choose to do with that and how we choose to release it from our body. And it has to go somewhere. It has to. It wants to come out and out through our peripherals, our hands and our legs right, like by running. It wants to come out through our mouth, maybe by using your voice, wants to come out through our hips by moving, but many of us, we just we bottle it down, right, it stays so, it stays in us and it crowds out the capacity to feel. So the next time we feel overwhelmed, we're actually feeling the overwhelm that we experienced two weeks ago, that we never actually discharged. So now you're feeling right, are you picking up what I'm putting down? Like? Now you're feeling all of it and it's consuming your body instead of like ooh, I noticed a little twinge in my chest. I feel a little overwhelmed, right there in this moment, right in this part, but I still can feel the rest of my body and I have space and capacity to hold, like energetically speaking, hold what someone else is going through.
Speaker 1:So breath work is a really cool way and it doesn't have to be the reset. You could easily do box breathing or 557 breathing, right, but I'm going to talk about, I believe, a lot of those are more reactionary and the reset is a very proactive way to create space in your quite literally in your body, so that there's more space for the next time you get overwhelmed or when your husband is irritated by your overwhelm, like you could hold all of it. So increasing capacity is the first way that breath work can impact your relationships. The second way is breath and emotions are intricately connected. They're also bi-directional, which means your emotions impact your breath, but your breath can also impact your emotions, and this is a superpower once you can learn this and practice it.
Speaker 1:It is a practice so, meaning if you notice when you are overwhelmed, notice your breath. My guess is it's very short and shallow like and it's very fast, right. And then, because our breath is fast, our heart rate turns, speeds up, our it responds to our breath. Our voice speeds up, our movement speed up. So if that's what's happening in our body, all in response to our breath, then we can sort of reverse engineer it. We can notice the overwhelm intentionally, slow down our breath intentionally, take a deep belly breath, elongate your exhale, because that's really what's going to induce the relaxation and the parasympathetic. Excuse me, if you notice you're getting really snappy women, once a month you're getting super irritated.
Speaker 1:Notice your breath. You are most likely holding it. You are most likely very fast breathing, right your body. When you're in this state, your body is sending signals that it's not safe to relax. Your body is sending signals that there is danger around you when there's really not, when it's really like your kids left their shoes out for the hundredth time or your husband forgot to put the cap on the toothpaste holder Right. These are not life or death situations. So we can use our breath instead of trying to just change the story and tell yourself it's fine, I'm not mad, but your body is screaming a different experience. Use your body, use your body and reverse, engineer it. Slow down your breath and just watch how everything will sort of follow after that.
Speaker 1:Okay, so it stretches your capacity, it impacts your emotions. It also, which of course, impacts your relationships. It also breath is an anchor to the present moment. So your breath again I said this in the beginning it's the first and the last thing we will do on this earth. It symbolizes the beginning and the end and it sustains everything in between, and so your breath is so necessary to keep you in the present moment. This is why, when you meditate, a lot of times they'll say focus on your breath, because your breath is not in the past, it's not in the future. It's here now, it's happening now and I know when we went on our marriage retreat the male coach taught my husband and taught the men there how something I love to teach and coach women on is creating polarity and something men can do.
Speaker 1:That seems so simple but I've experienced it and it's incredible. You know, when you're like talking to your husband and you know they're not there, like you just know they're listening and they're nodding and they're like uh-huh, uh-huh, but you just know they're not present. When they take their breath and they breathe in and pretend like it is this anchor, like the coach this was kind of funny said like send your breath to your genitals. But even if you just like imagine your breath going all the way down to your feet and pulling you into the ground, it's anchoring you, it's holding you. When you do that and your attention is all the way on your breath going down your body, it does something energetically. You can. I mean you've all experienced it.
Speaker 1:You know what it's like to be with someone who's present. Almost always their breath is a common, is a. It's a very unique pattern and it's the same when someone is present. It's a very strong, steady, slow, depthful Is that a word? I don't know, but full of depth. The breath is full of depth and physiologically, what this is is, like you can, they are breathing deep into their body and for me, I actually have a video of him doing that them sort of like teaching them to hold the frame and me just softening. And the teacher pointed it out and I was like yeah, yeah, I guess I do feel that, like you, just Soften, I don't know.
Speaker 1:So, using your breath, using your breath during intimacy, really focusing on your breath, really slowing down your breath. A lot of times we will like hold our breath during intimacy. Come back to the breath. It will bring you into the present moment. It creates the feeling of someone else being present, right, and when your body and your nervous system, when you know that someone's present, you will immediately feel safe. And when you feel safe, when your body and nervous system feel safe, everything else opens. Your heart will open, your mind will open, you will be more open to their experience. But it starts with safety, it starts with presence, it starts with the breath. So that's another way that the breath can really help your relationships. The fourth way is it creates and we sort of talked about this, but you know, as you focus on your breath. It's. It's a way to practice mindfulness, it's a way to practice self-awareness.
Speaker 1:Well, those are the precursors to being a good communicator. If you are not mindful, you're going to be a reactionary communicator, which is how I operated for years and years and years. Like I feel overwhelmed, I'm overwhelmed. You suck. That's how I would communicate. You're doing this wrong.
Speaker 1:But using the breath to practice mindfulness, to practice awareness, to be able to feel in your body where the overwhelm actually is, to be able to disconnect from the story in a matter of moments. Just by using my breath, just by coming back to focusing on my breath, it allows you to slow down your reaction, right? You get more space in that present moment to intentionally choose how you want to communicate. You also will become so much more aware of what you need. I work with many, many women that will say to me over and over again I don't. How am I going to communicate what I need if I don't know what I need?
Speaker 1:Well, you, ladies, it starts with your breath, allowing your breath to do the magic that it can do, allowing your breath to calm your nervous system and your body in the present moment, so that you can actually determine what it is that you need right now. Do I need a hug? Do I need a break? Do I need space? Do I need, do I need to scream what it is that you need and how can you communicate that? It starts from a strong, slow, steady breath. Okay, so the last way that breath work can really impact your relationships is it creates heightened sensory awareness.
Speaker 1:So we've sort of been talking about this when I talked about emotions and really being able to catch my overwhelm or my anxiety at a level two instead of allowing it to get so bad. But this also could be as far as pain. How many of us wait until we are our head is just throbbing before we address it. That's not because we don't care, it's not because we don't have time for it. I mean, some of us tell ourselves that, but the truth is a lot of times it's because we're not aware of it. We are literally that disconnected from our body and so doing breath work has allowed parts of my body that truly were numb. There was lots of parts of my body that like eat, and I'm sure if you did it right now and took your finger and just like rubbed your finger very lightly, like a feather sort of over your body, you would notice there's parts that, like just even comparing left to right side, there's parts that you don't really have sensory awareness there's. It's numb, it is truly numb internally inside your body, but also outside of your body, like just on your skin, and it's incredible.
Speaker 1:And so what breath work does? As I mentioned in the beginning, many of us breathe into our chest, so, like, really, from the chest down is not getting adequate breath. It's getting some breath but it's not getting adequate breath. And you need the breath in order to become aware sensationally, in order to feel your body. I do remember my mentor one time saying she could take her breath during a yoga class and send it to a part of her like I think it was her knee where she was experiencing pain and just intentionally bring more breath to that area and by the time she was done she could notice, sensationally speaking, decreased pain. And I was like, how do you bring your breath to your knee? Like that doesn't make any sense to me. And now it does. It's literally just fine.
Speaker 1:Tuning your awareness and following your breath into your body, you can feel it Like if you did it right now and you said I'm gonna send my breath to my right hand. And you went and you paid attention to your right hand. You would feel something. You would actually feel something. So breath work does heighten those sensory sensations and that can impact your relationships in so many ways, because the more aware you are of your internal experience we've talked about, the more capacity you have to hold theirs, the more you can communicate it, the more you can regulate it, the more you can be present to it.
Speaker 1:But also, I just taught a workshop to a bunch of ladies on igniting your desire and we talked about using your breath and using the pelvic floor, which I don't know if I explained this, but the pelvic floor and the diaphragm are actually antagonist muscles. So as one contracts, the other relaxes. So as you're bringing in, like as you are exhaling hold on, I'm not even gonna say this right, but as you are exhaling the pelvic floor, many of us relax the pelvic floor as we exhale. But in fact, if you can contract it, you can send some of the pleasure sensations that you would feel during physical intimacy. You can actually send them up your body, up your spine. So, using just the breath, you can experience heightened sensory awareness, like of pleasure. So not just heightened awareness of the painful stimuli, but of pleasure. You can move it. You can use your breath to move those sensations throughout your body, like this is what people are talking about when they say having a full body orgasm. So it's incredible and this is one of the key reasons why everyone needs breath work.
Speaker 1:And what I wanna just end with saying there's a lot of breath work you can do and I do it as well. I do the 557 breath, which is inhale for five, hold for five, long, exhale for seven. I do box breathing. I do something called the breath of fire, which is a really incredible activating breath can bring you energy when you're having that like afternoon lull, and so, yeah, there's lots that you can work with around that. But I always think of those breath work more as reactionary breath work, meaning when I'm feeling overwhelmed I go to 557 breath, or when I'm feeling tired I'll go to breath of fire.
Speaker 1:To me, the reset breath work is the most proactive breath work pattern you can practice. It is a way specifically like I'm hosting my virtual class coming up December 7th. I wanted to do it in the beginning of the holiday season, because I know how stressful it is. I know how you can feel pulled in a million directions with all the parties and all the gifts you have to buy and putting out the cards and all the stuff, and so I wanted to provide a proactive way to, first of all, safely and non-destructively like release what needs to be released, but also just to make more room, make more space for the stress that you already are going to experience. You might as well have more capacity to hold it. So that's the best way that I can really describe reset. Reset is proactive in your breath work practice. So if you are somebody that practices breath work in more of a reactionary way, that's amazing. That's beautiful. Keep doing that.
Speaker 1:If you want to experience some of the stuff I'm talking about here and allowing that to really bleed into your relationships, come and try the reset. I promise you will be hooked on it first of all, but you will just feel you'll go. Oh my God, I feel awake. Oh my God, I've never felt my body like that before. It's incredible. It's incredible.
Speaker 1:And I love helping women in their marriage, and this is just one of many of the tools I share, but it's one of my favorite because I think we can get so stuck in the story, so locked into what they did, how they're not showing up, this and that, that we don't actually move through. We think the experience is the story, but the experience is the sensations in your body. It's literally trying to create more space, and that is where I have found the most transformation in all areas of my life is when I'm doing work with the body, when I'm doing work with the breath. But it is also what lights me up the most, because it's a permission set for people to feel better without having to relive all the junk that just sort of like keeps them in their muck, if that makes sense. So I hope that was helpful. I love to give just a quick recap.
Speaker 1:So the five ways breathwork can help you in your relationships is it's gonna increase capacity for you to hold your experience as well as other peoples. It is bi-directionally connected to your emotions, so you can change your emotional experience simply by changing your breath. Your breath anchors you into the present moment, which is so key in any relationship. It creates mindfulness and awareness around your needs, what you actually are needing in the moment, which is a precursor to being a good communicator, and then you will have this heightened sensory awareness so you'll be able to catch yourself in a stressful state a lot quicker. But to also be able to amplify the pleasurable sensations that you get to experience in relationships laughing, lightness, orgasms, right. All of that gets to be amplified with your breath and it's amazing.
Speaker 1:So would love to just invite all of my listeners again, rate the podcast, leave a review, send it to a friend if there was something on here that really resonated and I would absolutely love to invite you guys to my breathwork class. It is the lowest price it will ever be. I don't have plans at this point to host it monthly. Right now it's gonna be reserved for my group coaching programs, but I want everyone and anyone to come and join breathwork. Bring a friend. It's gonna be an incredible night. It's all about letting go truly letting go of what no longer serves you, leaving it behind in 2023, starting 2024 off on a fresh start. Fresh, late. Yeah, I'm excited for the women that have already signed up. Men, if you're listening, you're welcome to join as well. It's one of the coolest modalities I've come across, so I hope to see you there and I will see you guys next week.