Marin leads a 20-minute yoga and breathwork routine to ease stress. You'll move through Mountain Pose, Cat-Cow, and Child's Pose, then learn two breathing techniques: diaphragmatic breathing with a 4-second inhale and 6-second exhale, and Breath of Fire, a rapid nasal panting that activates the diaphragm.
Chapters
Hi there, my name is Marin and I'm going to be sharing with you a few yoga movements as well as some pranayama, or breath exercises, that will help relieve stress. These are great poses or exercises to incorporate in your daily routine and to supplement to improve self-care. We need those little moments throughout the day to just wind down and de-stress and you'll be amazed at what just a few minutes can do. So let's go ahead and begin. The first movement I wanna share with you is just standing mountain pose with some breaths, followed along with a forward bend. Let's begin. Place your feet together or slightly shoulder-width apart. Let's go ahead and roll those shoulders back and down. Inhale.
Inhale.
Breathing those arms up overhead. Exhale.
Exhale.
Relaxing everything down. Find your center and shift your weight evenly between your feet as you inhale again. Lifting the gaze up.
Exhale.
Bring those shoulders down. As you inhale, I want you to imagine bringing in all the energy. And then exhale.
Whew.
With a big sigh, letting it go. Let's go ahead and inhale one more time up. And with this next exhale, begin to bend at the waist, keeping the back nice and straight. Bending, bending, bending. Bending those knees softly if you need to, reaching those arms down to the floor, and then relax the head.
Feel free to sway side to side here, walking those knees out if you want to. You might feel a little stretch in your neck or your mid-back. Then as you breathe, inhale back up.
Standing nice and tall. So go ahead and exhale down. [EXHALES] And let's go ahead and inhale. [INHALES] Bending into a nice forward bend again. [EXHALES] Exhale slowly, relaxing your center.
And then relax. You can feel free to sway or dangle here as many times as you like or for as long as you like, walking it out, making it dynamic, and even feeling free to straighten up and stretch out.
Let's go ahead and inhale to close this pose. Place those hands in front of your heart center.
Ah.
And again, you can repeat those movements as many times as you like. It's gonna stretch out your whole body, get the blood flowing through, and help relieve stress. The next stress relief pose that I wanna show you is the Cat-Cow. So we're gonna find a nice place to get on our hands and knees. You wanna place the wrists directly beneath your shoulders and your knees directly beneath your hips, so they're all shoulder and hip width apart. You can feel free to tuck your toe for extra support or place the tops of your feet down on your mat. We're going to work with our breath similarly to the Mountain and Forward Bend. So as we inhale—
Inhale.
We're gonna drop our belly to the ground, lifting that tailbone to the sky, pressing the shoulders away from the floor. Floor and lifting our gaze. This is the Cow Pose.
As we exhale, we move into Cat, dropping our head, pushing away from the ground, rounding out our back and tucking in our tailbone, hollowing out the belly. And then we'll inhale back into Cow again.
Drop that belly down. Don't shrug your shoulders. Lift that neck. Then exhale back into Cat.
Whew.
Really pull that belly button into the spine. And then inhale again.
Gaze up towards the ceiling.
Exhaling. [SPEAKING IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE] Dropping the head between the arms. Let's do this for a couple more breaths together. Feeling that massage our spine and our digestive organs. Waking up the central nervous system.
And allowing us to relax.
One more Cat.
[EXHALES] From here, neutralize the spine, and we're gonna move into our next pose, which is the Child's Pose. Pressing our hips back down towards our heels. It's okay if you can't make it all the way.
Just stretch those hands all the way up and bring the forehead towards the floor. The most important thing is that you can find a place to relax your forehead. Relax your body, let those arms stretch. Breathing nice and deep. If you can make it all the way down to your heels, feel free to do so. And just relax here for a few moments. Taking a nice deep breath. Good.
Any of these poses you can do throughout your day. You don't necessarily have to be practicing yoga. You can just take the time to stop and do it, and you're gonna see it will reset your whole internal environment. Now let's go ahead and do a couple breaths. The first breath I want to show you is just deep belly breathing or diaphragmatic breathing, and you can do this by either finding a comfortable place to sit or even lying down. If you have a hard time feeling where your breath is, try doing this on your back instead. So we're going to place one hand on our chest and one on our belly. What I want you to do is breathe in nice and deep through your nose. And feel which moves up, your belly or your chest. Ideally, you'll feel your belly rise and then your chest rise. If you only feel your chest, then you're shallow breathing. So the best exercise you can do is laying down, place both hands on your belly, and just focus on breathing in, filling it up, holding that breath for a sec, then relaxing.
Ah.
And releasing it very slow. Now I'm gonna sit up to show you what this should visualize in your mind as you continue to breathe. You're gonna fill up the belly, nice Buddha belly as I like to call it, expand those ribs right out here on the side, then lift the chest. And as you fill all the way up, up, up, sip a little more air, holding that breath or trying to pull in more air for just a second, before exhaling through the mouth in a nice controlled manner. So let's just try this 2 times around. We're gonna breathe in for about 4 seconds and exhale for 6. Ready? In.
In.
Hold. Then exhale slow. Ah.
Great.
Let's do that one more time again together. In for 4 seconds. Hold. Then exhale slow.
Ah.
It's okay to have a little bit of that ujjayi or that sighing breath so that you can hear it in your throat. It's a great way to practice just internalizing and it's going to help you relieve stress. The beautiful thing is practicing this breath, it's gonna carry in throughout your day and hopefully subconsciously so that you're always breathing deep, full breaths more efficiently and more effectively bringing oxygen and blood into your body. Let's go ahead and try the next breath, which is just the Breath of Fire. This is a great way to just reset, cleanse your body, feel exhilarated and more alive, which is nice because if we're stressed out, it takes that energy and places it in a more productive manner. So we're going to take a big breath through our nose. [INHALES] And through our nose, we're gonna pant in and out. Like this. Now, the most important thing is you're actually expelling the breath and inhaling sharply. So they're sharp exhale, inhales. Ex and in. So in and out. So it's kind of like if you want to practice panting like a dog. But the most important thing is that your belly is pushing, your diaphragm. Is the one that is helping expel this breath. So try this just very gently to begin with, in and out through your nose.
Hhh, hhh, hhh, hhh.
You can start like that. And then as you get better, inhale and do this for anywhere from 20 to 30 breaths. Let's try to begin. Good. So go ahead and practice those. Take the time to do them anytime you like, and you're going to be feeling really awesome. It's a great way to take care of yourself throughout the day, and it's going to really relieve stress. It's just a little bit that you have to do to make a big difference. I hope you've enjoyed it. Thank you so much for joining me.
