Introduction

Emily Dickinson, the American poet, is known for taking a walk prior to writing her poems. She had to move, in this case in nature, to think. Today we have exponentially growing data that sedentary lifestyle work habits and learning methods contribute to disease and lack of wellbeing. Movement keeps us healthy, sharpens our neural connections, supports staying fit in mind and body well into our elder years, all contributing to enhanced memory and the retrieval of stories, facts, and emotions. The establishment of a safe and easygoing classroom climate with social emotional intelligence helps support calm focus, or alertness without anxiety. Teacher education in establishing a calm environment has research that relates to how best to learn.

The age old adage, “There will be enough time to sleep when you’re dead” may not motivate university students to get enough sleep or to discover the health and psychological benefits of sleep. However, this talk is about rest and about how mindful movement also shifts you into an alpha state, a state of relaxed alertness. Mindful movement keeps relaxation going while being in action. Specifically, conscious movement can be employed to either a small or a large degree through talks, engaging with slower forms of movement and having self-reflective dialogue to contextualize. As an educator, you can do 20 second activities with students or expand these type of practices, encouraging students to engage with movement activities, conversations, and accessing the underlying physiological science.

I’m going to share now just some basic mechanics of breathing. I think everyone knows now that exhaling is one way to calm down the nervous system. So, in order to really get the most from our aliveness, we can breathe at different rates. In particular, to calm down the nervous system and to join into a rhythm of relaxed alertness. If we can get our diaphragms moving more fully, we’ll take a deeper breath. The diaphragm is right here at the bottom of the rib cage, and when I dome my hands up like this, I’m simulating the muscle that goes across from the front to the back of the body through the attachments on the ribcage and upward into the center of your body. When we breathe in, that diaphragm contracts, there’s a kind of tension, and it flattens down, creating a vacuum for your lungs to fill. So let’s just play with that. Kind of press down. And you’ll often hear about belly breathing, so you’ll feel your belly growing outward because of that compression downward, but it’s also in your lower back. And if you’ve ever had lower back pain, breathing into the lower back helps a lot. So just take a moment now and take an exhale actually first. Let out as much air as you can through your teeth. Now, just notice, some movement in this area as you breathe in. You can place your hand on your belly or on your lower back or just feel that diaphragm. And I’m talking, so that means I’m exhaling. And again, breathing in. And out. So that is the activity. Once you’ve learned diaphragmatic breathing of the thorax, of this part of the body, you can just ask people to take a moment to exhale and inhale. And it can be just five seconds and it really helps.