Be Well: How to Center Yourself Using Outdoor Meditation

<div class="block">We&#39;re continuing our outdoor fitness series with some beach meditation. Try these moves to center yourself in the present and help boost your overall awareness.</div>
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beWell

Take a look at the beauty that is surrounding us right now. Sometimes you just need to take a moment, take it all in and appreciate where you are. And that just fits so lovely with what we're going to do right now because we're going to focus on ourselves and on our breathing. So talk me through what we're going to do. So this morning, we couldn't be in a better place to create some body and mind balance through. So this is something you could do at home, you could do it out in nature, you could do it on the beach. So we're going to start just allowing our body to be nice and long. So let your spine be long and feel that you can kind of feel the earth underneath you. So this sense of foundation and from that sense of foundation, let's lengthen up the spine, let the crown of the head get a little bit taller and draw the shoulders back and down. So now we're going to start with this alternate nostril breath. But before we get there, let's just close down, our eyes, take a nice deep breath in together and let's let that sigh out the mouth and let's do that two more times with your next exhale. Just start by releasing any tension from the body and the mind allowing the air to carry it away. And then this last time nice deep breath in as you exhale, just let go of any of the thoughts or stories that you might have arrived with, arriving in the now in this beautiful place. Nice now one just breath on your own in and out through the nose. And now let's set ourselves up for an alternate nostril breath, which is really balancing to the hemispheres of the brain. So we'll start with the left hand and the lap some in first finger connecting that just allows us to center. We're going to relax the arm, relax the hand and then we're going to take our right hand and just fold the first and middle fingers in your ring and pinky become one. And now we're sliding the thumb and the ring finger down the bridge of the nose resting right above the nostril crease. Now, be sure that you're relaxing your shoulder, your hands, the muscles in your face. Let's take a deep breath in through both nostrils and a nice full breath out. Just pause at the bottom at this little edge of your exhale and then close off the right side. Let's inhale through the left side at the top. Pause, you're gonna switch sides, exhale out the right, the eyes can close down or you can have a nice soft gaze and we're creating balance between the hemispheres of the brain, balance between the body, the mind allowing the spirit to be able to be a little bit more present, especially on this beautiful day.