In today’s” Yoga Snack,” we focus on a Pranayama practice called color breathing. This practice combines breathwork with visualization to help clients manage stress, connect with their inner world, and achieve greater self-awareness. We discuss how therapists can integrate these techniques into their sessions, providing clients with easy-to-implement tools to enhance their well-being. 

"This is something you could do while you’re driving, you can do them while you're in a waiting room, and we can do them as we take breaks during the day as therapists for our own self-care”

Colour For Health

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Chris McDonald: Are you ready to try a breathwork practice that is easy, accessible, and that clients will love? In today's episode, I provide a yoga snack, which is a simple yoga practice that you can experience. And as a bonus, I provide tips for integrating into sessions. Integrating what's called color breathing in your sessions can help clients connect more deeply with their inner world, manage stress, and cultivate calm.

We'll explore how different colors can resonate with specific emotions. and support grounding, relaxation, or can be more energizing for depression. Tune in to learn how color can become a bridge to greater self awareness and healing for your clients today on this episode of Yoga in the Therapy Room podcast.

Welcome to Yoga in the Therapy Room, the nontraditional therapist's guide to integrating yoga into your therapy practice. I'm Chris McDonald, licensed therapist and registered yoga teacher. This podcast is here to empower therapists like you. With the knowledge and confidence to bring yoga into their practice safely and ethically.

So whether you're here to expand your skills, enhance your self care, or both, you are in the right place. Join me on this journey to help you be one step closer to bringing yoga into your therapy room.

Hey Ian. Welcome to the Yoga Therapy Room podcast, the Non-traditional therapist guide to integrating Yoga into your therapy practice. I'm Chris McDonald, once again, licensed therapist. And today we're focusing on yoga snacks. So yoga snacks are episodes where I bring a practice to you, may talk about the benefits, why to use it, and some basics on how to start it in your sessions.

Today, we're going to focus on a Pranayama practice, which is breath work. Pranayama is one of the eight limbs of yoga. And this therapeutic technique we're going to talk about is color breathing. This is one of the favorites that I teach my clients that everybody, I'm trying to think there's only probably been one person who hasn't liked it.

Everybody loves this as their favorite. So this approach combines breath work with visualization. So it invites clients to use it to help bring in what they want. And release what they don't want, and there's lots of different ways to do that. So I'll guide you through this, this practice and how it can help them to tap into their inner resources and offers a more gentle, accessible way to support them on their journey.

So be sure to put on some comfy clothes. Take a cozy seat if you need to. Pause this episode and get yourself settled with some tea or whatever makes you feel comfortable. And let's step into this world of color breathing. So why should we use pranayama practices in session? It is the most accessible, convenient, easy way to start bringing yoga into your therapy room.

Coping, because what I found was that talk therapy was helpful, but it wasn't enough even in the school system where we did more brief solutions therapy and we are with students for a limited time period, there were repeat offenders, shall we say, not in a negative sense, but just people, kids that we'd see all year, pretty much who really struggled.

And I really wanted to find something that could. benefit them. But it was easy because sometimes we see kids for five minutes, sometimes 15, 20. We didn't always have the quote unquote regular therapy session hour or 53 minutes or 45 minutes. So we really had to get these, yes, snap it, get to your coping tools and practice.

And the kids loved it. So I would bring it in lots of creative ways and they liked it because it was accessible and wherever you go, you have your breath. And for adults too, once I started to see adults in my practice, when I got my therapy license, they were glad to have these tools that were easily accessible.

Because this is something, some of these are so easy, you could do them while driving, you can do them while you're in a waiting room, and we can do them as we take breaks during the day as therapists for our own self care. As always, I recommend that you do the practice with the client, because I think it would be awkward if you bring a lot of these practices in and just You're telling them what to do, but you're not doing it, especially for clients who may feel self conscious, and you can also give the option to turn the camera off for telehealth sessions, or if they want to close their eyes in person, if they're self conscious and don't want you staring at them as they're breathing, because I know some clients, especially teenagers, this may, they may struggle.

You want to bring it in safely, of course, to monitor, but sometimes we can keep this accessible for people that may. feel more uncomfortable with the therapist breathing in front of the therapist because this is not traditional talk therapy. This is more an alternative and complimentary modality. But I have found that using Pranayama practices is a foundation of what I use in my therapy room for yoga.

And often new clients, that's where I'll start them once we get rolling and we get through the intake and start to get to know each other. And I offer that as an option. and see if that's where they want to go. Most do, and I also offer it as homework as well. I always explain to clients that coming to therapy is a great step, but it doesn't end there.

The more that you can integrate some of these practices we do in session or other homework assignments, the more that's going to benefit you and help therapy be even more effective. And these are lifestyle changes to integrate these practices. And with Pranayama, we also have to talk to clients about, The importance of doing preventative work, that means not waiting until you're super stressed or anxious to use these breathwork practices, but to use these on a daily basis.

And of course, behavior change is hard. Clients often need support to start any of these practices regularly. But you can go back to the motivation scale. So tell me on a scale of one to five, how motivated are you to bring some new things into your day and to make changes? So if they're a five, which would be extremely motivated, one is not at all, where are they?

If they're at a five, then they may be really willing to do this. If they're lower, that's okay. You can roll with the resistance and just let them know this is fine. We can work with that, but this is just an option. So giving that as an option to let them know that They have the power to utilize this if they want and the more they put into this, the more they'll get out of it.

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Chris McDonald: And being able to help them identify when would be a good time to bring this into your day. Could it be in the morning?

Could it be in the afternoon? Or before bed? So narrowing it down as well and assigning that for homework can be really beneficial. This is not a one time conversation, by the way. As you know, whenever there's behavior change, clients forget. Sometimes I have clients we, on telehealth, I feel like we shut it down.

Session's over. And they forget everything that we just said. So it's okay. So finding ways that we got to get creative sometimes to help them make reminders and ways to remind themselves to, um, use these practices regularly for the most benefit. So let's say you have a client that's in session in front of you and seems like they're more anxious today or stressed out about something.

And They're talking about wanting to practice some ways to release stress and maybe they're restless, having trouble sitting still. You see them wringing their hands together. This could be a good time to reflect back what you're seeing. I notice your hands are sliding back and forth, that you're having trouble sitting still.

I'm wondering if it would be helpful for us to pause right now and would you be willing to try a breathwork practice? And just pause, see what they say. And I've had many clients say, oh I've tried breathwork, it doesn't work for me. Great, good for you for giving that a go. So can you explain and show me if it works for you?

what you've done before for breathwork. Now, this is an important step when bringing breathwork into practice, is to really get a clear understanding on what they've done for that. And to be honest, I did work with a lot of kids and teenagers. Many times they would say, okay, I'm going to show you my breathwork.

I'm going to inhale, big inhale and exhale. It didn't work. And I'll ask them and get curious. So how many times did you do that? Oh, one time. But it didn't work. So you can see the humor in that. But yeah, just backing it up. Back up the truck. Find out what is their experience. What happened. And just kind of offer it from the lens of curiosity.

Would you be willing to try it? We could do this as an experiment. See how this goes. See how it feels in your body. And we can stop at any time if it's uncomfortable. How would you feel about that? So if they say yes, great. Just caution them that If they feel dizzy or heart's racing or lightheaded during this, that will stop.

And they are welcome to stop at any time. So just giving them that option and choice is important in bringing any yoga in the therapy room. But I'm going to share with you one practice first that you can use. And I'm going to fill in the blanks for this. I'll tell you what I mean in a second. So if you were my client right now, I would say to you, What do you want to bring into your life right now?

Give me one word. It could be an emotion like calm, peace, love. And ask them, and you pause, ask them what it is. And let's say that you tell me your word is calm. Great. So what would be a color that you'd be associated with calm for you? What would that look like? And you tell me that color is blue. Great.

So what is one thing that you want to let go of? It could be an emotion. It could be a behavior. Anything at all. And they tell you what that is. So I'm going to fill in the blank for this. So I'm going to say you said you want to let go of stress. And what color do you associate with stress? And you tell me brown.

So go ahead and get comfortable and we're going to inhale calm and exhale stress. But with this, you're welcome to close your eyes if that feels okay for you, but I want you to imagine bringing in the color blue on each inhale, which is the calm. And exhale the brown, which is the stress. So let's start.

Go ahead and inhale the calm, breathing in the blue. We're going to pause at the top. I want you to imagine the blue going from the top of your head all the way down to your feet, filling you up. And exhale the stress. So imagine the stress coming out with the exhale as a brown color energy into the air that evaporates.

And let's do that again. So inhale the blue calm, pause, filling up every fiber of your being, every cell, and exhale the stress out, the color brown, letting it go. Inhale the blue calm, and exhale the stress brown, letting it go, releasing. One more time, inhaling the blue calm, and pause, and again, imagine it filling up every part of your body, and then exhale the brown stress.

Longer exhale than inhale if possible. Good. And let that breath go. Notice how you feel. So checking in with energy, emotion, notice how this feels overall in your body, in your mind, in your spirit. And this is a very helpful practice because this is one you can take with you wherever you go and each day it could change.

So maybe tomorrow you want to bring in more love and you want to exhale anger based on something that happened that day. So this could change based on how each day is going. Now another way to do this is to inhale and exhale the same thing. So what would that mean? So we want to bring in, let's say love, so we could inhale love, the color pink, and then exhale love, A color pink out into the universe.

So instead of evaporating, imagine it going to each person in the world, each living being. So there's lots of ways to play with this. So this is a really fun one to use. And I did want to share about colors and breathing that it can be very powerful practice to even suggest different colors. I can also share this for the show notes for a link, which lists different colors and what it promotes and what it's good for.

So an example is red, which promotes energy, strength, motivation, confidence, courage, and that's good for depression, negativity, shyness. So it could be just an inhale on the red and then whatever they want to exhale, picking another color from this list. Orange stimulates body and mind, also good for depression.

And one for anxiety is green. that can help with balance, harmony, self acceptance. Turquoise can also help with healing, relationships, resilience. Purple can help with inspiration, imagination, and empathy, sense of belonging, and also help with stress, anxiety, confidence, low self esteem. So there's so many different ways to get creative with color and just using it as an imagination activity.

And like I said, when you practice this, you can say to them, just feel the color enveloping you inside from head to toe. You can pause and have them notice. You can remind them to feel it in every cell. Really see their internal body spirit filling with this color. I hope this was helpful and I don't want to go over my yoga snack time for today.

Wanted to keep these nice and short and sweet, but thanks for listening. I hope you like this practice. Feel free to shoot me an email if you want to give any feedback or if you have some creative ideas for color in breathing at chris at yoga in the therapy room. com. And thanks for tuning in. Are you struggling with burnout and feeling exhausted?

Do you always put others first? It's time to put you first. My Self Care for the Counselor Companion Workbook was written with you in mind. This workbook provides simple strategies that are not only practical, but easy to integrate into your busy life. Discover how to boost your energy, and how to improve healthy habits for eating, exercise, and sleep.

Revitalize your practice with holistic morning and evening self care routines, plus get access to links for soothing meditation, self massage and grounding, plus yoga. Elevate your well being and become a more mindful counselor today. Check out the Self Care for the Counselor Companion Workbook at hcpodcast.

org forward slash workbook. That's hcpodcast. org forward slash workbook. And once again, this is Chris McDonald sending each one of you much light and love. Until next time, take care. Thanks for listening to today's episode. The information in this podcast is for general informational and educational purposes only.

It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are giving legal, medical, psychological, or any other kind of professional advice. We are not responsible for any losses, damages, or liabilities that may arise from the use of this podcast. Yoga is not recommended for everyone and is not safe under certain medical conditions.

Always. Check with your doctor to see if it's safe for you. If you need a professional, please find the right one for you. The yoga in the therapy room podcast is proudly part of the site craft network.