“Breath in, listen to the sounds around you”
As I sat listening to my breath with other expectant mothers my thoughts wondered to previous breathing lessons I had experienced. This breathwork was missing something, it wasn’t taking me deeper into myself, I wasn't finding a sense of relief.
“What do you hear outside the room?”
I wondered how can this help my stress and anxiety thinking outside of myself?
What impact was this really having on my fragile mental health?
After class, I searched through the transcripts of my movement training. I hadn’t taken any notice of these fundamental lessons during my 4-year training program. Transmission of breathwork can reduce our sympathetic nervous system responses. This can have major impact on our wellbeing by changing the chemicals.
During this time I was struggling with life challenges.
My family had broken apart,
I was going to be giving birth single,
my career was threatened,
and I was driven headfirst into an anxiety/stress pattern.
Heavily pregnant it was vital I reduced my stress for the growing baby.
My story might be different from yours but I’m sure you can find similarities to the life challenges we all are faced with at times.
How we respond to stress is dependent on what we have done in the past. Learning to sense rising stress levels isn’t something we are taught, it’s is something that we have to make time to learn.
I had spent my life educating myself about the body, movement and performing at elite levels as a professional dancer and dance teacher. This anxiety/stress pattern was not something I had experienced before, it sent me into a spiral of social anxiety. Living day to day on the edge.
Can you relate?
I’m lucky I had invested my time and energy in the method years earlier. Now during this challenging time I was now able to access what I already knew to heal my own self-sabotaging behaviours.
This is the beauty of consistently doing Awareness Through Movement lessons. They are the deeper work for you to access parts of yourself you may not be aware of.