Table of contents hide 1 Breathing is a gift and we must know how to use it 2 Believe it of someone who has struggled a lifetime to breathe 3 Ways to breathe correctly in children and adults 4 Yoga for speech 5 Yoga for us It helps control our nervous system
The amazing breathing tools were designed to help children wake up and calm down. The use of breathing as a tool to help with self-regulation and optimize performance dates back thousands of years, where athletes, mystics, musicians and other specialists long discovered the strong power in a single breath .
Breathing is a gift and we must know how to use it
Currently, from the moment we take the first breath as babies until our last breaths, breathing is a gift that continues with us, no matter where we are, at what time of day, if we are unconscious or conscious. A perfectly oxygenated blood flow helps us to move muscles in an efficient way and also destabilizes our brain, becoming more apt to be able to execute, focus and remember.
There is even evidence to support the idea that conscious breathing improves our ability to respond empathically, becoming more understanding and caring people .
Believe it from someone who has fought a lifetime to breathe
Full breathing is a beautiful gift, since as an asthmatic person, I became more aware of what I could achieve when my lungs and airways were open compared to the discomfort and limitation I felt when my breathing was restricted. There was nothing sweeter than the morning after an asthma attack at night, when I woke up I felt free of the tension that had been generated in the throat and chest during the previous night.
I remember that I was in bed taking breaths of delicious air while my body was recovering from the exhausting test that had happened during the previous night.
But you don't have to be an asthmatic person to appreciate and benefit from deep breathing . When conscious breathing is regularly practiced, it can become a reliable tool to help people self-regulate, especially young children. All that is needed is an awareness of what it means to have a correct breath, in addition you have to have the will to practice the techniques that support it.
Time is not necessary, since you breathe having or not having time. This is why you should consider the alternative and ask yourself, why not breathe consciously ?
Ways to breathe correctly in children and adults
Place your hands on the belly, when you inhale slowly through the nose you have to feel that your belly expands outwards and when you exhale slowly through the mouth you should feel that your belly is going back to your spine .
If you do not understand this at the beginning, you should only practice patiently and try a few times until you do. Sometimes the accumulated stress in our bodies, poor posture or inactivity produces shallow breathing habits that take a long time to leave. But you can achieve this so-called belly breathing if you keep trying patiently. I guarantee this.
After helping elementary students learn and practice breathing instruments during the last decade, I am surprised at the positive influence they can have on the abilities of the bodies and minds of the little ones that allow them to self-regulate. Weekly, he guided hundreds of students to feel comfortable with their breathing and use it to concentrate, energize, reflect and replenish, so when I leave class, I know they are left with a beautiful gift that they can develop and use the rest of their lives.
Yoga for speech
I am often asked how speech or language specialists can benefit from taking a yoga workshop or training. I guess another way of looking at this question is how do yoga tools help children achieve speech goals? Then we will give you some answers to both questions, no matter how you want to see them.
The practice of yoga and mindfulness helps to organize and calm the nervous system, an autonomous nervous system that is divided into two branches . The sympathetic nervous system that authorizes us to respond quickly to stress and threats through struggle and the parasympathetic system, which is the one that is directed towards relaxation, n, repair and reflection.
We function at our best when we manage to balance these two systems, since most children who receive a therapeutic intervention, whether occupational, speech therapy or physical intervention, are working with a compromised and disorganized nervous system .
Children who have special needs have a sympathetic nervous system bias, separating this branch of the autonomic nervous system. When this occurs, the learning centers of the brain are tuned and closed. Our main goal as a human being is to stay alive and take care of any imminent threat, but when this switch is on all the time, there can't be much learning. When our body and mind are in a state of relaxation, the parasympathetic system can be activated, giving us a better potential to learn and retain information.
Yoga helps us control our nervous system
Speech implies coordination between movement and breathing, this being exactly what is practiced through yoga, moving and breathing.
It is very simple not to take into account the need to teach a basic function such as the way of breathing, much less breathing and moving. When I started teaching yoga to my students, I was surprised to see how I was unaware of the lack of coordination and insufficient breathing. When I realized this, I began to focus all my sessions on teaching students how to breathe. This created a strong change in their function, regulation, behavior and in their spontaneous discourse, since without a breath awareness, it is very difficult to teach a child how to project, articulate, respond and interact.
When speech is taught through yoga, we usually use specific poses to facilitate inhalation and alternative poses we use to facilitate exhalation.
Yoga poses for children are usually related to the things that are in nature, since children like to make serene sounds when they are in the cobra pose, in the dog pose they usually bark and scream like a rocking monkey between trees. Making sounds becomes very meaningful in a fun and attractive way, stress free and helps children to be more creative.
Yoga teaches us to remain fully with a positive perspective so that we can witness the little miracles that are really there all the time. As therapists, we are trained to observe, analyze and determine how to help our children overcome the challenges of their diagnosis and improve their overall function, but unfortunately, this keeps us focused on what is not working, which is the negative aspect of their be whole
We know that positivity generates positive results and negativity produces bad results, but what we do not know is that the thoughts and feelings we experience while we are with children can be felt by them and can affect their functioning. Yoga teaches us how to keep in touch and how to be aware of our own state.
TRANSLATION: Lurdes Sarmiento
