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Reminder: take three of the biggest breaths you’ve taken all day with Tracee Ellis Ross

Tracee Ellis Ross

Helpful, simple, gentle.

Sometimes all you need is a reminder. A gentle nudge that allows you to stop and take notice. Especially as so much of what is happening in our current climate leads us to feelings of anger, frustration, anxiety and unease. And that’s what Tracee Ellis Ross has done. Provide us with an invitation and a guide. To let go, relax and release - just for a moment. 

Stress accumulates in the body. You have to actively release it. A long walk, yoga, mediation or simply breathing. As Ross explains, her method of breathing is “a way to meet and greet yourself, lovingly and gently, with tenderness.

“I keep feeling so disrupted in my nervous system, so fried, so easily knocked off my centre,” she explains. And so she provides a simple three step approach that can be done anywhere. Your couch, your car, your bed or your office chair.  

First, simply sit. “Allow your body to be still and to let go,” Ross encourages. Take stock of your body. Send your thoughts to your knees, your eyelids, the skin of your forehead, your stomach and your shoulders and relax each muscle, each part of the body as you do so. 

Next, Ross guides you to “allow the substance of who you are, your bones, the weight of who you are. Not the weight of the world but the substance of who you are.” It’s a three-part approach that power is beguiled by its simplicity. 

And finally, exhale. That’s it. And as Ross emphasises: “You don’t have to give it meaning more than just this.”

 

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