Ready to scream? Why not roar instead?!

Have you ever had a day where you start out on the wrong side of the bed and things just seem to get worse from there? Where things at work seem to just add to your frustration and the phone messages and emails just keep mounting up?

If you’d seen me a few years ago would have seen this was a normal day for me. It took me years of suffering through jobs I hated and working with people that drove me mad before I found a better way to live. But I’m not about to tell you my solution was leaving the corporate world (eventually I did, but not for this reason). My solution was to develop a daily morning routine that changed how I reacted to all these things.

I learned how to shake off tension, how to slow down my immediate reactions to people, events and things and how to feel calm and focussed even while I was more productive than I had ever been. Did I never have a bad day again? Of course not. But I had a LOT less of them, and when they came, they were milder.

One of the thing I learned to do was when I wanted to scream, find a way to move that energy through me. If you’re at home, you can scream into a pillow but if you’re at work a walk around the block can work wonder OR you can try one of my favourite yoga tools - Lion’s Breath. If you’ve ever seen the New Zealand All Blacks do a Haka dance before a rugby game, this reminds me of that!

Lion’s Breath is very simple

Take a deep inhale through your nose

Exhale through your mouth, open wide and stick your tongue out as far as you can towards your chin making a ‘ha’ sound. You can do it with your eyes closed or do crazy eyes and really go for it. The ‘ha’ can be done with just the breath sound or if you have privacy you can say it loud or even yell. Do this  3 - 6 times or more if you want to. 

The benefit of doing this breath is you will get a release of deep held tension from the face, jaw and deep core muscle meridian of the body. It’s considered ‘facial’ yoga, helping to prompt collagen production and tone the skin. But best of all it create a huge energy shift and will leave you feeling better - it’s hard to do a lot of lion’s breath without finding yourself smiling or laughing at how silly you feel after!

I would love to know, what do you do to feel better when you're having 'one of those days'?