Hi,
Welcome.
My name is Chelsea and I will be guiding you for the next five minutes or so on a meditation to access our ventral vagus nervous system state.
So go ahead and find a comfortable seat or you can lie down.
Take a moment to do that for yourself,
Your body.
And then if it feels right you can close your eyes or soften your gaze.
And already just tune into your body whether you're seated or lying here.
I like to frame mindfulness,
Awareness,
Mindful presence,
Sort of like a flashlight of awareness.
That's how it's been framed in me before and it was helpful.
And so with this flashlight of awareness,
Just start to become aware of your whole body here.
Bring your whole body into this felt sense of what it means to have a body in this moment.
And we're not needing to change or fix anything about our body or about our experience or about our breath.
We're simply just noticing and being with what is allowing ourselves to land here in this moment,
In this time.
And with that flashlight of awareness,
Start to narrow it in towards your breath.
So guiding it from the full body experience to the breath.
Noticing your inhales as you breathe in through the nose and the warm exhales as they move back through your nose.
And after a moment,
Just start to notice if your mind has maybe pulled you away to somewhere in the past or somewhere to the future.
And just acknowledging it,
Not needing to change the state of your mind.
Maybe even labeling it as thinking or planning or remembering.
And with so much friendliness as if you were,
Your mind was your own good friend.
Just invite yourself back to paying attention to the inhales through the nose,
Following as they travel down the diaphragm into the belly,
And the exhales making their way back out through the body through the nose.
And from this space,
We'll start to play with our breath.
So we'll move into humming breathing,
A humming type breath.
And what this is doing is we're accessing our vagus nerve in our body,
Which is known as the wandering nerve.
And it connects to essential organs all the way up to the brainstem,
Down to the gut,
Heart,
Liver,
All of these kind of organs that help our body move through the day.
And what the vagus nerve does is it allows us to access the parasympathetic part of our nervous system where we can move into a place of rest and digest.
This is helpful if there's been a state of maybe hypervigilance,
Feeling more anxious,
Feeling more defensive,
This can be a great practice to sort of find that balance,
That fluctuation between that ventral vagus nervous system state to the sympathetic nervous system state.
Because it is important to be alert,
But when it's in constant state,
It can be really detrimental to our health.
All right,
Let's try it.
So what you will do is you will,
I'll guide you to take a breath in.
And then on the exhale,
We'll hum it out.
So it will sound like this.
And we'll do that for three rounds just to kind of get a sense of what that's like in our body.
So go ahead and breathe in.
Hum it out.
And just sort of take note any subtle shifts in your body and your heart and your belly and your mind.
And feel free to keep this humming practice going if it's something that feels like it's serving you in this moment.
Or see if you can take this practice out into wherever you're going to next as a way to move from that ventral vagus state of our nervous system where we feel connected.
There's a balanced sense of feeling alert and also present.
Thank you for taking the time to do this practice today.
Talk to you soon.
Okay,
Bye.
