10-Minute Breathing Meditation for Emotional Balance

Hi, my name is Chloe Freytag, and welcome to Get Healthy U TV Meditations. Today, we're doing a 10 minute breathing meditation for emotional balance. So according to many ancient sciences and traditions like yoga or traditional Chinese medicine, our nostrils are associated with either our calming energy or energizing energy. And the way that these nostrils work together produces different kinds of emotions and feelings in our body. So when we work with the nostrils in the way we're going to today, kind of alternating between them, it naturally balances the flow of our emotions in our body, and therefore results in a more balanced, emotional life externally.

So any reaction we have to things, maybe becomes a little bit more neutral instead of a sort of aggressive or extreme response. So it helps us maintain emotional balance. It's a great meditation to do if you do feel kind of an emotional reaction to something, but it's also good to do just as maintenance to keep yourself feeling balanced, feeling calm, and feeling able to handle these emotions when they do arise in our life. So find your way into a comfortable seat. If you wanna sit cross-legged like me on the floor, that works.

Maybe you wanna sit in a chair and that feels more comfortable, or place a pillow or a bolster under your hips to kind of elevate that a little, however you feel good. And then allow your arms to rest comfortably on either your knees or in your lap. From here with your spine lifted nice and tall, we'll close our eyes, or you may choose to softly gaze towards the floor. Start by taking long, deep breaths in and out through your nose, just sort of connecting into your body, into your breath, exactly as it is. And this breath pattern we're going to do today is called alternate nostril breathing.

So what will happen is we'll block off one nostril at a time, either using our thumb or our pinky of our right hand. You'll breathe in through one side, at the top of your breathe, you'll switch. So you'll block whatever nostril was blocked, you'll switch and block the other one and you'll exhale through the alternate nostril. Then you'll repeat it on that side. So you always are changing the hands when you're on that breath in.

The breath out you stay as you are. We'll do this for one minute here together. So start to bring that right hand up, maybe your thumb is blocking off your right nostril. Take an inhale through the left. At the top of the breath is where you'll switch blocking off your left and then exhale through the right.

Inhaling now on the right. Switching on the top of the inhale to block the right nostril and exhaling through the left. Again, inhale through your left nostril. Switch at the top here and exhale through your right. Last time, inhaling on the right.

Switching at the top, exhaling out the left. And allow that right hand to comfortably rest back onto your knee or in your lap, keep your eyes closed, and just breathe through both nostrils a few breaths, noticing that maybe one felt a little more closed or hard to breathe through, that's okay, that's totally normal. This is why we alternate. We go through both to try to even out the dominance so that neither nostril is stronger than the other, but they both have balance. So just take a few more breaths through both nostrils.

We'll prepare for another minute of that alternate breathing, switching at the top of your breath every time. Take a nice breath in. Breathe out. And bring your right hand up, blocking your right nostril, inhaling on the left. Switching nostrils and we're exhaling on the right.

Inhaling right. Switching at the top, exhaling left. A few more times, inhale left. Switch at the top, exhale right. Inhaling right.

Exhaling left. Last round here, inhale on the left. And then exhale on the right. Let that hand rest back down onto the knee, keep sitting tall, breathe through both nostrils comfortably. Big deep breaths in, big breaths out.

Just enjoy that air coming in, that oxygen filling you up. Providing you with balance, stability, simply through your breath. Take a few more breaths at your own pace in and out. We'll prepare for another minute here of our alternate nostril breathing. So by now, this is becoming a little bit more comfortable.

I'll have you go at your own pace, just making sure that you always switch the hand at the top. So go ahead and bring that right hand up. Let your thumb close off the right nostril, and start this breathing at your pace for one minute. Always switching the hand at the top of the inhalation. You can breathe as slow or as quickly as is necessary for you and your lung capacity, which is key moving at your rhythm, making sure you switch the hand at the top every time so that you're breathing through alternate nostrils.

30 more seconds here. Doing your best to breathe evenly, if you need to kind of open one nostril, it's a little sticky, that's okay. It doesn't have to be totally blocked off. Just do your best. Wherever you are in this breath cycle you can start to relax that right hand back down and just breathe through both nostrils.

Big deep breaths in, big deep breaths out. Enjoying this breath. Feeling that calm energy that comes from working with our breath, from balancing our energy through the breath and therefore balancing our emotions. Take a few more deep breaths here. Take another full deep inhale in, and exhale out.

We prepare for our last final round here. Bring that right hand up, closing off the nostril last minutes of our breath, alternate nostril breath, do it again at your pace. Switching at the top of the breath. In your best to keep this breath even and steady. 15 more seconds here.

Wherever you are in this breath pattern just allow the right hand to relax back on to the knee or either into the lap, and again, take a few breaths through both nostrils. Enjoying this natural balance we've created through our breath. Softly you can start to blink the eyes back open and that concludes our meditation here today at Get Healthy U TV. Thank you so much for taking this time to meditate with us. Remember, this is something easy that you can put at any point in your day, only takes a few minutes.

Be sure to check out all of our other meditations as well. And we'll see you here next time at Get Healthy U TV. Thank you.