Return to the Present With Mindfulness

(drink fizzing) (mouse clicking) (calm music) Headspace Studio. (soft calm music) (birds chirping) Hi, I'm Dora, and welcome back to Radio Headspace and to Tuesday. So the other morning, I was taking an online yoga class. Now, I'm not too much of a yogi, but I do value the benefits that yoga brings. The instructor was offering beginner poses as well as a few advanced ones, and I thought, hey, let me try one of these advanced poses, since I've been doing this for a while now. So she instructs us to do the pigeon pose, and if you don't know what that is, it's like the splits, but your front leg is at a 90 degree angle and the back leg is straight. So as I struggled to maneuver my way into this position, the instructor said, don't compromise your breath for the sake of a pose, because the whole thing with yoga is that you should be able to breathe while moving into these different poses, and here I was, holding my breath the entire time. So afterwards, I was reflecting on that class, and it made me think about how so often in life, we simply forget to breathe, but when we take a moment to pause and fill the body with air, we create space and open up ourselves to the possibilities that exist in the present moment. A few months ago, I was guiding a one-on-one session with a woman named Ruby. I mentioned her in a previous episode. Ruby was exhausted and burnt out from taking care of her family members, and in our session, we were connecting and trying to create a plan of action for how she can learn to take better care of herself, and the one goal that she wanted to achieve was just to be able to breathe and remember her breath. And so what we did in the session and what we can do here is just take a moment to sit up straight, place one hand over your heart and the other over your stomach, and just begin to notice your breath. And now, bringing the focus to the short pause in between each inhale and each exhale. And so as you breathe, there's the pause just before you breathe out again, and that's where that sense of possibility lies. Becoming aware of that pause is how we can become aware of our choices. There's a quote by Viktor Frankl that says, "Between the stimulus and the response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom." I'm sure, well, I'm not sure, but I can definitely speak for myself and say that there's been moments in my life where taking a breath would've saved me and stopped me from saying something harmful or from acting from an unconscious place. There's nothing worse than when you can't take back what you've said already, but...