Finding your center: Breathing and balance exercise

Objective: This breathing and balance exercise makes you aware of your mind and body relationship. Starting with a breathing exercise lets you become conscious of your body and prepares you for balance exercises. After balancing and grounding yourself, you will reflect on how your awareness altered over the course of the exercise.

Duration: 45 minutes

Materials Needed:

• Floor space

• Speaker

• Yoga mat (optional)

• Journal (optional)

Exercise Outline:

Warm up (10 Minutes)

• Begin with a walking exercise: Walk around the room keeping awareness of those around, pick up to a jog, and a run

• Light stretching: Neck rolls, reach up to the sky and down to your toes, deep plie in second, lunges, spinal twist, butterfly, downward dog, child’s pose

Finding your center (30 Minutes)

1. Conscious breathing (Have students lie on the ground)

   1. Questions: Do you feel yourself breathing quickly right now? Are you nervous or thinking about something in particular?

   2. Is there a place that makes you feel safe, can you imagine it? (sit on that for a minute) - back to conscious breathing, have you noticed a shift in relaxation?

   3. Do inhale for three and exhale for three to end the 1st breathing exercise

2. Balance and finding groundedness

   1. Come to standing position and move body around in a circle

   2. Close your eyes

   3. Do you notice any changes with closing your eyes, how does this change your perception of the motion?

3. Balance with leg raises (front, lateral, and back)

   1. Raise your right leg to the front and notice how much you think about it, how do the tendons in your ankle feel? Are you clenching your muscles? Are you thinking about balancing and staying grounded or are you mindlessly balancing?

   2. Close your eyes again, how does this make you feel? Do you feel more balanced after the previous exercises? Are you trusting yourself?

   3. Repeat for lateral and back on right side and front, lateral, back on left side.

   4. Tree pose - bring right leg to knee with hands stretched in the air (repeat for left side) -  a little more involved, just to see how balanced you feel now

4. Come together for final thoughts

   1. Sit in butterfly and close your eyes

   2. Reflection questions: Did the conscious breathing center yourself for the coming exercises? Did you feel more balanced as you closed your eyes in standing positions? Did you feel balanced and grounded enough?

Reflection (5 Minutes)

• Reflect on the overall exercises of today. If you have a favorite, write it down and let the instructor know. Reflect on whether all exercises were beneficial or related to one another (breathing and balance). Additionally, you can also reflect on the questions asked in the final thoughts circle.

Note: This class made us conscious of our breath, balance, and trust of friends. However, it can be modified in case of time. Starting with the warmup is necessary, however, you don’t need to do both the walking and stretching exercise (doing one is perfectly fine). In a sense, this could be broken up into two shortened exercises - breathing and balance. However, since they correlate so well together, doing them all at once is advised unless time is cut short. This is a recommended exercise to people just beginning somatic education.