Episode 43 - Remember To Breathe

Do you feel like you're juggling all the things? You're trying to look after yourself, take care of your loved ones, and build your business. Overwhelm creeps in before you know it and things start to escalate from there. 

Do you ever take the time to pause and observe how you’re breathing? Or do you continue and keep going despite the stress and anxiety build-up?

Oxygen is one of the most vital things our body needs. Effective breathing can help us in so many ways such as better sleep, effective food digestion, it can enhance our immune system, decrease our stress levels and so much more. 

Without noticing, most of us are shallow breathing daily. We miss the signs that our body shows us to slow down and focus within.  

This week, I will be sharing with you the challenges I’ve faced over the past few days, the lessons I learned from them, the different methods and benefits of breathing, and some books and app recommendations for you to try. I talk about the things that many of us forget during these hard times: To relax and breathe.

Join me in Episode 43 to be more mindful of how you’re feeling physically, mentally, and emotionally by using the power of your breath.

Also, stay tuned for our new book: The Women Who Gathered.

Eleshia’s Essentials

• When we're busy, we just take in conversations and let them sit there without recognizing that they're actually festering us and becoming something bigger.
• We always think about all of the things externally that we can look for to help us manage stress, overwhelm, or to stop procrastinating but sometimes we have to start within.
• Give yourself that time to exhale, breathe it out,  take that time to sit with your feelings, assess what was coming up, or maybe journal about it.  Don't let it sit and fester in your body because it comes out in different ways. 
• Life is about living the life that you want.
• When you find that clarity, you can do amazing things.
• Remember that your breath is going to help to clarify your desires.

Other resources mentioned

• Insight
• The High 5 Habit: Take Control of Your Life with One Simple Habit by Mel Robbins
• Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor
• Wim Hof Books
  

About the show:

Need simple strategies to help you grow your business and achieve more without working harder? Struggling to balance work, life, and all your other commitments and don’t want to burn out? You’re in the right place. 

The Eleshia Show is a holistic business and lifestyle strategy podcast to help you get clear on your business goals, stop procrastinating, boost your income, and do what lights you up. 

Women are taking notice! We have listeners across 41 countries and over 420 cities! We’re teaching female business owners across the world how to achieve more with less while looking after themselves. And we can do the same for you!

We’re having intimate conversations — the kinds that most female business owners are having privately. You don’t want to miss these.

Tune in to the podcast every Wednesday to discover exactly what expert CEOs did to get their businesses off the ground and achieve success so you can do the same! 

With your host, Eleshia Harris, business coach and growth strategist, you can redefine what success means, ditch the stress and confusion and learn how to run your business from a place of ease and excitement. 

If you want to talk business, wellbeing, lifestyle, mindset, goals, and scaling organic growth, don’t miss it!

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Show Transcript:

Eleshia Harris:  Stop and take a moment, and breathe. And I know we all know this. But how many times a day are we just stopping to breathe? How many times are we actually saying to ourselves, we have something internally that is going to help us. And that is our breath.

Hey, I'm Eleshia Harris, and I am the host of The Eleshia Show where each week, we'll be having conversations about how to enhance your wellbeing. We'll be sharing strategies and stories and insights to build your business while still navigating life because sometimes we try to separate the two. And let's face it. If you are not well, you have no business. I am a holistic business growth strategist and a wellness coach who spent over 15 years in corporate before deciding to choose me first to build my brand, Eleshia Lifestyle. I'm here to teach you how to redefine what success means to you, ditch the stress and confusion, and learn how to run your business from a place of ease and excitement. Let's get into this week's episode.

Hello, and welcome back to The Eleshia Show. I am so, so excited to have you here with me. And today, I am shouting out Gambia. Thank you so much to all of my Gambian listeners. I am so, so excited to have you here. And as always, continue to listen and continue to spread the word about The Eleshia Show. I am so excited that I have so many listeners across the whole world, but I want more. I want more people to listen to all of the fantastic subjects and topics that we're talking about. And I just want people to continue to invest in themselves. You know that's what I'm all about. If you have somebody in a different country or a different city that you know would benefit from listening to the topics that we are discussing, please go ahead and share with them the podcast. That would make me so, so happy. I am on a mission to spread the word that you don't have to make this hard when you're building a business and looking after your lifestyle and your wellbeing. It doesn't always have to be hard. Sometimes it is going to be hard, but it doesn't always have to be.

So today, we're going to talk about some hardships. And this week has been just that for me. It's been really quite difficult. I have had to really hone in on some of my practices. And I'm going to talk about one in particular because I didn't realize how much I was holding on to. And I didn't realize how it was affecting my whole body. And the outcome, the outcome of things that I really want you to get done and I didn't get done, or the stresses. The stresses of running the business and also looking after myself and my home life. And when I recognized what I was doing, I excelled. And so simply, I want to talk about breath today. I want to talk about the fact that most of us are shallow breathing day in and day out. And so, I want to share with you what happened this week. And maybe you might hear something that you're like, oh yes, Eleshia, I can just tweak this. And it's going to help me to improve the way I do things or the way I think about things going forward. So remember, as I always say, take what you need and leave the rest. And also, just continue to invest in you. So let's get into it.

As some of you may know because you've been listening to previous episodes, I am a caregiver, I'm a mother, and my wife, I am a business owner. And so. sometimes it feels like I am juggling the most and this week I didn't recognize that I was going to be triggered the way I was. And so I missed some of the signs that I needed to slow down. Let me tell you a little bit about my week last week. So I do the nursery run a few times a week, and they are doing a lot of roadworks where we live and on the route to the nursery. So I had been stuck in numerous traffic jams. And usually, I just let it go. But for some reason, this week, I was just in that state of panic. And I think one of the reasons why is because I had bumped into a family friend at the beginning of the week. And we had had a conversation, just a brief conversation. She had known my mom. She knows my family. So she was comfortable enough to what I found as sensitive questions. And so that had me spinning for a couple of days. And I didn't recognize how much I had taken from that conversation and really internalized it. When you're busy, you sometimes just take in conversations and let them sit there. And then, you don't recognize when they're actually festering and they become something bigger.

So one of the questions that she asked me was if I was going to have any, well, she didn't really ask me if I was going to have any more children. She actually said, Eleshia, you're not just going to have one, are you? And I was taken aback. I was really taken aback by this because we've not all had a great two years. As you also know, I am the carer of my brother who's on the autism spectrum. And so, that takes a lot within. And also I was like, you don't know my journey. You don't know the fact that it took me some time to actually conceive. You don't know the backstory of what I had to do. You don't know the fact that I had a miscarriage. You don't know that I had to make space to have this child. And I left my job to do that. You don't know all of these things, but yet you were comfortable enough to say that to me. I answered as diplomatically as I could because I don't know what the future holds. And also, I didn't want to have that open conversation with somebody who isn't close to me. But I did recognize that I answered and I thought about her feelings more than I thought about mine. And then I just continued about my week.

But then it led me to start to think about the fact that we are alone. The four of us, we don't really have any other help. And so it really started to play on my mind with regards to the past and the present and the future. And I felt my body getting more and more and more tense. And the tenser I got, the more I started to feel less empowered to move forward in my week. And I put it down to the fact that I was coming on to my period in a couple of days. So it was just like, okay, I'm feeling like this because my period is due and It's been a rough emotional week. I just also finished a 5-week container of writing. And I don't know if you can hear, but I'm smiling. So yes, I am going to, well, not even, yes, I am going to be. I am co-authoring a book with 33 other ladies called The Women Who Gathered. And I am so, so excited about this project because it's something that I wouldn't have done previously. But I've done so much work on myself over the last two years that this project is so, so close to my heart. I just finished right in my last piece for my chapter. So all of that emotions were coming up as well. And I did not give myself time to breathe.

I am meaning that quite literally. I hadn't stopped. I literally had not stopped to think about how writing this chapter was going to make me feel, how this person had asked me such personal questions, how my daughter had been so high vibe that week, how the fact that my brain was in overdrive and I felt so heavy and thick because my period was coming. I had a little bit of brain fog. I had less and less patience. When I excelled and recognize this, it reminded me that I had been shallow breathing for the whole week. And then I took the biggest exhale, and it just reminded me of that film waiting to exhale when Angela Bassett took the biggest exhale. And she started to really recognize the things that had been going on in her life. And I don't know why that film or that connection had come up right this minute, but it did. And so I realized that I was keeping myself in that stressful state because ultimately, I am in charge of me. 

When we think about these things, we sometimes always think about all of the things externally that we can look for to help us to manage the stress, to manage the overwhelm, to stop procrastinating. But we always have to start within. And when I recognize the fact that I had not been still, fully still, for a few days. I could really feel my brain just talking to my heart and saying, Eleshia, stop. Just stop. And I've talked about this many, many times when I've said, we have to recognize the signs in our body. We have to listen internally to what is going on, and I could feel it. And like Mairi said previously, I hadn't really turned off that road and said, stop. Just stop. And I think it was because there were so many things coming at me that sometimes you just get in that place where you're like, wow, how is it already Wednesday? How is it that I still got so many things to get done? How, how, how? How am I going to do everything? And I just recognized it was time to stop.

Stop and take a moment, and breathe. And I know we all know this. But how many times a day are we just stopping to breathe? How many times are we actually saying to ourselves, we have something internally that is going to help us. And that is our breath. How many times are we really internally working with our breath? And so this week, I just wanted to say that this was something that was really helpful for me. I was internally and emotionally and physically exhausted. I didn't realize that over the five weeks of writing so many traumatic memories we're going to come up. So many things were going to then impact how I was moving throughout my day. I didn't realize that there were going to be things that I had buried for so long. They were going to come up. I didn't necessarily equip myself for that. I didn't build time in for my diary just to stop and just breathe. What I'm saying is I have reminders on my phone. But what I didn't know, this was all new to me. 

Writing like this was a new experience for me. Putting my feelings down and listening to what was coming up was a new experience for me and my body. Although I'm really good at having white space in my diary, I still did not recognize the impacts of how I was going to feel on top of coming on my period. I know the week before I come on my period is really an emotional one. And I know this. But for some reason, I didn't really embody all of that. And maybe it was because I needed to have this conversation. Maybe it was because, again, we always learn from those lessons. And maybe because this is another part of my growth journey. But I really wanted to share that with you because if there were things that you know that are coming up, that is going to drive you into emotional despair, but make sure that you give yourself that time to exhale, to breathe it out, to take that time, to sit with your feelings, to assess what was coming up, to maybe journal about it. Don't let it sit and fester in your body. I know so many people who have done that, and it comes out in different ways. 

My mom, for example, I know there was so much that she was holding on to. And part of me saw that within myself this week. And I knew that I had to take that time and breathe and exhale and release the way I was feeling because I don't want it to sit in my body. I don't want it to affect my relationships. I don't want it to feel like this ease in my body and that's how it was feeling this week.

So it was a great reminder. And I'm so lucky that I'm in tune with my body. Right now, I'm standing, recording this today because I knew that I couldn't sit down. I feel grounded. My feet, I feel grounded to the floor. The crown of my head feels lifted. My shoulders are down. I knew this is what I needed today. And so, as I go into my new week and hopefully, as I'm talking to you, something may resonate. I am taking that time to breathe. I'm taking that time to really honor my breath. I'm taking that time to release my shoulders and to lengthen my spine. I'm going back to everything that I've learned within my training. I'm going back to remembering some of the breathing methods that I've learned previously. And I've done a lot. I've done them all. I've done alternative nasal breathing. I've done the belly breathing. I've done the lion breathing. I've done longer inhales and longer exhale breathing. And all of those have helped me in different seasons of my journey. But I just want you to really recognize that we need to choose a method and breathe. so I am dedicating this week to more breathwork. 

When I recognized that I just needed that time to stop and breathe, I've got to a place where my period had just come. And the next day, I felt depleted. And you know that I don't want to be in that state because I don't want to feel that way when I come into my next phase. Because then it feels like it's a vicious circle that we keep on going through phase after phase where we just continue to feel lethargic and exhausted. So then that body just gets used to feeling that way. So this week, I am dedicating a lot of time to breathing. I'll be meditating. Even though I had been meditating last week, but I was just going through the motions last week. So this week, I am going to take that time. Because when I actually sat with my body for an hour. After teaching a client on Saturday morning, I went back to bed. And although I couldn't sleep, I just put on an hour of meditation and I just went in and out of consciousness, and it felt so good. When I woke up, I felt energized. And that's what I want this week. So I'm going to go back to my meditation. You know I love Insight. It's so, so useful for me. It's an app that you can download. It's got tens of thousands of meditation episodes from five minutes right through to an hour. They do live meditations as well. So that's a really good tool for you.

I've got my dance and my breathing reminders on my phone already. And again, I am going to be really conscious about doing that this week. I really love the idea of just placing your hand on your heart when you're feeling overwhelmed. I think Mel Robbins calls it high-fiving your heart. I believe, in her new book, The High 5 Habits, and I'm doing it now. You just press your hands on your heart. And it really helps calm down your nervous system by switching off at the vagus nerve.

And then, sometimes if you're really feeling really overwhelmed, and then all you do is you breathe in nice and wide. And you exhale, and you just release. I think she used the words, you're okay, you are loved, you are safe. And just by repeating that over and over again, pressing into your heart, you can really slow down the breath and the overwhelm. And that works really, really well when you just need a quick strategy just to stop the overwhelm because think about it. Think about it when you are in that overwhelm, that's when the inner critic starts. That's when you start to talk yourself out of all of those amazing ideas that you have. That's when you start to eat the food that you don't want to eat and you consume wine. That's me anyway. I'm putting my hand up to that.

And so when you just work on calming down the breath, it can instantly, instantly help you. I've been listening to a book about breath for the last three months, I think. I think mentioned it before. I've always got different books on the go. But just having that moment last week really reminded me that I haven't finished a book, Breath by James Nestor. So I am putting back on my list of things that I need to finish by next Friday. So that's going to really help. And then I have been fascinated by Wim Hof's work for years. And so I am going to be spending a little bit of time just reacquainting myself with some of his methods. 

I'm not going to plunge myself into cold water just yet. I'm not ready for that. But I also know, at some point, that is something that I do want to do. But just not yet. So I am just going to really take the time to remind myself that I have this internal system. I have this internal breath that we all rely on, that we also all forget about when we are in that state of overwhelm when we're anxious, when we don't know what to do.  I know how much I've depended on my breath throughout my life. And so, I'm really going to be using that to work on healing my body this week. Really healing my body. 

When we're reminded of the job that the breath does, it calms us down instantly. So let it do its job. Let it calm you down. And remember, all of the benefits of the breath. Remember that it helps to detoxify the body. Remember that it helps to lower the blood pressure. Remember that it helps to really help with your anxiety and when you're overwhelmed. Remember that it can help to improve your immunity when you're holding on to all of those toxins. Remember what I said, it can create this ease. So remember that the next time you're rushing around and then you start to feel overwhelmed and then your day goes left instead of right. Remember to remind yourself, just to take that moment to slow down and breathe, to ground yourself. 

I really, really hope this episode has just reminded you how important the breath is and how important you are. I use breathwork a lot with my clients because sometimes they come to sessions, and I can see them spinning. So we do a nice quick grounding exercise where we can get back into our bodies and feel safe and feel grounded, lessen the overwhelm, and send oxygen to the brain so that we can actually be clear in what we want and the desires that were asking for. Because ultimately, that's what life is about. It's about living the life that you want. And when we're stuck, we can hardly do that because sometimes when we're stuck, it feels like we're paralyzed. So we invite you to do that for yourself, really do. Because when you get quiet and you listen to what you want and you find that clarity, you can do amazing things. I had a client who got really quiet in her body, really quiet. And the clarity came. And the other day, she rang me and she was like, Eleshia, I made nine thousand in one day in sales. She made $9,000 in revenue in one day. Because the work that we had done to really get her very clear and quiet helped her to find clarity. And then helped her to move her desires forward. With the coaching and the implementation work that we did together, she was able then to go and call in her clients because she was working within. And I want that for you. 

So remember your breath. Remember your breath is going to help to clarify your desires. And that's what's really helped me this week. If that's something that you want to work on, then I am here. I am here for you. All of my offerings are in the show notes. And I invite you to just come and have a conversation. Just come and have a chat. Have a coffee chat with me, have a Prosecco, have a green juice. Book yourself some time in so we can really get to work on what you really want, what your desires are really for the course of the next couple of months, the next years, the next weeks, and the next days. Let's get into it. Anyway, I really, really hope that this episode has inspired you to really, really connect within. And I look forward to spending time with you next week. Until then, bye-bye. 

I really hope you enjoyed this episode of The Eleshia Show. If you loved this episode as much as I did, head over and rate and subscribe so you'll never miss an episode. New episodes drop every week on a Wednesday. I can't wait to hang out with you again soon. And lastly, remember to invest in yourself first because you are important and amazing. Take care. Until next time. Bye-bye.