One Sweet Breath Before You Eat

Sweet Friends, are you looking forward to your August being full of gatherings with family and friends that involve delicious harvest foods? 🥕🍅🫛🫐🍒🍉

This is the season of backyard barbecues, picnic tables groaning with food, family visits, and meals eaten happily out of doors. There's such joy in it all… and also, if we're honest, there is a fair bit of busy happening during this August harvest season!

As we enjoy all the moments within this last month of summer, amid the busy-ness and relaxed routines, we may find ourselves arriving at the table still buzzing from the day, plate in hand and in mid-conversation as we begin to eat… before our body has had any chance at all to actually settle.

Today I would like to share the smallest, sweetest practice with you… one that asks for nothing more than a single breath 🧡

Here is my offering of this simple practice:

• at your next meal, before that first bite,

• pause and take one slow, conscious breath.

• allow your exhale to be long and unhurried.

That's it… this is the whole practice.

It takes all of three or four seconds, and no one at the table even needs to know you're doing it.

Why does something so tiny matter?

Because that one deliberate breath is a quiet signal to your nervous system to shift out of go-go-go mode (sympathetic nervous system) and into our "rest and digest" mode (para-sympathetic nervous system).

Our bodies genuinely digest more comfortably when we're calm than when we're rushing, and a single grounding breath helps usher us there.

This is not a call to change what you eat or how much; This is simply an invitation to change the state you arrive at the dinner table in. Using our conscious breath to make this small shift will leave you feeling so much more settled and at ease… both during and after a meal 🙏

I love this little practice because it's another example of Functional Healing in its simplest and most authentic form... taking something you already do several times a day (eating and sharing delicious summer-time food), and weaving conscious breath right into it:

• No new routine,

• No extra time,

• No special tools.

Just one sweet breath before you eat, turning every ordinary meal into a small moment of coming home to yourself.

So this week, as the harvest food is gathered and prepared to nourish and fill you, let your breath say grace in its own quiet way, one sweet breath at a time. 🧡

Happy August, Sweet Friends!!

Love,