Category: Breathwork

A breath token is a breathing exploration that I develop for friends & clients and post as a gift.

In 2021 the breath tokens are about our relationship to breathing.
In the current climate, rather than giving instruction, I feel like taking a step back and formulating an open question instead.

The question for this month is: What makes me glad? This is an invitation to sense how gladness expresses itself in the body and the breath.

A breath token is a breathing exploration that I develop for friends & clients and post as a gift.

In 2021 the breath tokens are about our relationship to breathing.
In the current climate, rather than giving an instruction, I feel like taking a step back and formulating an open question instead.

The question for this month is: How do I connect breath with touch?
Is there a connection for me at all, and, if so, what’s that like? Or is this something yet to be discovered?

A breath token is a breathing exploration that I develop for friends & clients and send out as a gift.

In 2021 the breath tokens are about our relation-ship to breathing.
In the current climate, rather than giving an instruction, I feel like taking a step back and formulating an open question instead.

The question for this month is: What am I willing to let go of?
How does the breath respond to this question? Maybe the exhale feels pleasurable, the pleasure of letting go, of letting be. Or maybe there’s a sense that it’s too difficult to let go, even a single breath. In any case, there’s much to be discovered.

After her phenomenal memoir of surviving Auschwitz, psychologist Dr Edith Eger wrote a book about her work as a psychiatrist The Gift, 12 Lessons to Save Your Life.

Based on the Hungarian saying „if you sit with one butt on two chairs, you become half-assed“, a metaphor for leading two lives and keeping a secret, Dr Eger developed an exercise, taking the saying literally. 

„Healing can‘t happen as long as we‘re hiding or disowning parts of ourselves.“, she says. By physically experiencing what it feels like to sit on two chairs at the same time, we can get a sense of the cost of having to „bridge the gap between our ideal self and our real self“. And then, in comparison, what it is like to sit in one chair, in „our own fulfillment“. In the exercise, Dr. Eger also guides us to experience the breath in the two positions.

A breath token is a breathing exploration that I develop for friends & clients and send out as a gift.

In 2021 the breath tokens are about our relation-ship to breathing.
In the current climate, rather than giving an instruction, I feel like taking a step back and formulating an open question instead.

The question for this month is: How do I feel?
As the years go by I find this question more and more essential because how I feel influences my breathing and when I don’t know how I feel or I don’t want to feel how I feel, the breath cannot flow. Feeling and breath move together, coming and going of their own accord, if we let them.

Listening to trauma expert Dami Charf talk on the subject of „orientation“ the other day, I thought that her suggestions on how to orientate correlate directly to Natural Breathing. 

“Orientating myself, looking around the space where I am, releases me from being stuck in traumatic states. With orientation in the present moment, I can arrive in the actual situation and the body can relax.”, Dami Charf said.

Orientation can be looking around the room, or naming or touching objects, silently or aloud. Dami Charf advised to keep orientating oneself until a reflective inhale comes, which signals that the body has reset itself.

A breath token is a breathing exploration that I develop for friends & clients and send out as a gift.

In 2021 the breath tokens are about our relation-ship to breathing.
In the current climate, rather than giving an instruction, I feel like taking a step back and formulating an open question instead.

The question for this month is: Where can I sense the breath movement? And How do I experience the breath movement in that place?

We can explore the question through touch, movement, sound, writing, drawing… We can explore it any time, anywhere…

If you have any questions or would like to share something with me, please feel free to contact me: hallo@nicolacaroli.com.

Breathing experts Dr Ela Manga and Viola Edward have developed a method to assess healthy breathing parameters: Breath Quotient – observations of Breath Intelligence.

Here’s the article from Dr Ela Manga‘s website:

“Breathing is far more than the exchange of air. It is a language. It is a reflection of the quality of life force as it is expressed through the body, mind and heart. Every breath that we take mirrors our conscious and unconscious thoughts, the emotions, feelings and sensations that we experience in every moment. The breath can also be a reflection of deeply held emotional trauma, of habitual patterns of tension that have been carried from the moment of conception, or the experience of birth and the conditioning imprinted by family, culture and the journey of life.

Observation of the subtle nuances of our breathing patterns is simply the most obvious and measurable way to observe the mental and emotional fluctuations reflected in our physiology. Through our awareness of the breath as a support for mindfulness and presence, we are offered an entry point to help release unconscious breathing habits that hinder clarity and balance.

Here’s a great article on the effects of backbends on cardiovascular health, and thus breathing, by Yoga and anatomy teacher Sara Doyle PhD.

“Last weekend I taught a Yoga Lab workshop on the anatomy of back bends. Yoga Lab is a monthly workshop at Blue Point Yoga Center that draws from the latest scientific research to understand the effects of movement and mindfulness. There are many good reasons to practice back bends, but improvement in cardiovascular health may be one of the most important, and one of the most overlooked. There are several ways that a regular practice of back bends can impact your heart and lung function. The back bends don’t even have to be deep. Moderate poses such as bridge pose or locust pose would work well.