Do you hold your breath when you are anxious or tense?
Do you find yourself holding your breath even in pleasure or orgasm?
Have you ever just wondered about breathwork?
Then this week’s episode is FOR YOU!
This week the incredible Abbey Daw, breath & yoga instructor, joins Dr. Stormy to discuss:
– Why you want to breathe better
– How better breath leads to deeper pleasure and better sex
– How to use breath as an embodiment tool
– A breath practice – alternate nostril breathing
Abbey Daw has over a 1000 hours of RYT yoga certification hours as well as advanced training with Ana Forrest. She won entrepreneur of the year in 2015 from the Salt Lake City Woman’s Business Center. Abbey is the founder of Magik Breath and Meditation where she mentors women one on one as well as guides group classes. Abbey’s first book is to launch this year. A big LOVE DEEP welcome to Abbey!
Watch below to learn how better breathing can positively impact all areas of your life!
Also available on all your favorite podcast platforms at Love Deep Lab Podcast! (Itunes, Spotify, Google and more)
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Deep love and honoring and until next week…. stay sexy!
Transcript
Better Breathing Leads to Better Life and Sex | Episode 5 with Guest Abbey Daw
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
breath, breathing, breathe, abbey, nostril, pleasure, life, feel, women, listeners, fabulous, adding, people, practice, sex, body, pandemic, sexiness, magick, breathwork
SPEAKERS
Abbey Daw, Intro, Dr. Stormy
Intro 00:03
Welcome to the love deep Lab podcast helping you integrate sex, sexiness, sacredness, and science in your life and your bedroom. And now, your host, Dr. Stormy!
Abbey Daw 00:15
Hi, I’m your host, Dr. Stormy and welcome to the Love Deep Lab Podcast, which is all about adding sexiness and passion in your life – both in and out of the bedroom.
Dr. Stormy 00:27
And I’m wondering if you’ve ever felt like you hold your breath when you’re anxious? Or you’ve ever wondered how good breathing can improve all parts of your life, your health, and your sex life?
Dr. Stormy 00:37
And if you’ve wondered any of those questions, then today’s episode is totally for you!! Today we have a special guest with us, Abbey Daw who is a friend and colleague of mine and who has a fabulous bio. So I’m going to introduce here her here now. Abby’s been teaching for about 18 years in various studios throughout Utah. She has over 10,000 hours of yoga therapy certification through Inbody Academy. She’s also trained with Anna Forrest and has completed her advanced training in NYC in 2013. She’s an entrepreneur at heart and she won Entrepreneur of the Year in 2015 for the SLC woman’s Business Center for her first business – Sweat and Soul. She is currently the founder of Magick Breath and Meditation, which empowers women to embody their light and live their purpose. In Abby’s spare time, she enjoys mountain biking and drinking coffee. She’s currently writing a book and aspires to be an author and will complete this dream in 2021. And she has recently started Magick Mentoring, which is where she works one on one with women. So welcome Abby to the Love Deep Lab Podcast!
Abbey Daw 01:44
Thank you so much. It’s so nice to be here.
Dr. Stormy 01:48
Awesome. Thank you. And Abbey, I’m just gonna give her a little plug. She’s one of my very favorite yoga teachers in a town full of fabulous yoga teachers. Her class is hard as shit.
Abbey Daw 01:59
I appreciate you coming all those years because that wasn’t for everybody. That’s for sure.
Abbey Daw 02:06
Her yoga for athletes class that was absolutely for athletes. It was amazing. So awesome. So happy to share your time with you today.
Abbey Daw 02:13
Thanks, Stormy.
Abbey Daw 02:15
So I’m just curious…..obviously today’s episode, we’re talking about breath. And I just would love to hear your thoughts, Abbey, on why do we care about good breathing? Why are we even interested in learning to breathe well?
Abbey Daw 02:29
Well, I wasn’t interested in it at all. In fact, I feel like the majority of us…. and this isn’t a judgement…. it’s just something that we haven’t been educated on. Like a lot of things. We are born as balanced breathers, belly and chest breathers, in a balanced way. And as we move through life and traumas occur, just with life in general, we learn to breathe out of balance. So we start to hold our breath, like you said in the beginning. And/or we have very shallow breathing, where we feel like we’re barely breathing it all. We have people that have sleep apnea. We have people who have just debilitating anxiety, and they don’t know how to breahe and to release it from the body.
Abbey Daw 03:12
So I I accidentally stumbled upon learning how to breathe again. And it’s funny, I say that now because I’ve been a yoga teacher for a very long time, and I teach people how to breathe. But at the same time, I personally wasn’t breathing in this way where breath is a tool for absolute embodiment. But when you do it consciously, every single day, then your whole life changes. And long story short in the pandemic, I lost my yoga job, and all my other jobs. I was also recovering from postpartum anxiety and I’ve suffered with anxiety my entire life, which I’m sure a lot of people can resonate with as a common thread. I went down the breath work rabbit hole, and I’m telling you what, I cannot miss a day now!! 20 minutes, sometimes 22 minutes a day without fail. I get up I do my Kundalini and I do my Kriya breathing and I do all this stuff. And I wonder how did I ever not have this in my life? Well now my goal and my purpose is to get other women to breathe again because it would just eliminate so many things that we’re going through. So yeah, that’s basically it.
Dr. Stormy 04:37
I love hearing your story and pandemic woes and finding breath. It’s so beautiful. When I hear that storyI I think of my life until I found breathwork as a tool and as a practice anytime I was anxious or angry or stressed or even overly busy (which is a thing for me), I would breathe really crappy and really super shallow. I think there’s also like a cultural messaging that’s super messed up of like…. ” hold it in and knit in our ribs and suck your belly in” which really works against fabulous breathing. And so your mission is so great to help women learn to breathe and learn to find breath as a tool. You know, you said it changed your life. I mean, for me, I would absolutely say that without question. breathwork, for me, has been life changing! And, and it’s so wild, because we have to breathe, right? If we don’t we literally die. So we might as well learn to breathe fabulously.
Abbey Daw 05:47
A deeper breath is a deeper life. It awakens your body, your sensuality, and your sexual energy. And you know, it changes your brain chemistry and all the neurotransmitters all of those things that help us our brain function. If we just knew how to breathe, we would just be in joy and happiness in our body and confident and in our power. Amazing.
Abbey Daw 06:15
Yeah. And so I heard you also say that you have incorporated your own daily practice of breath as a part of your practice. So just for our listeners the encouragement to be curious about adding breathwork, even just a few minutes a day, into what you already do for self care, because it can go right alongside of meditation or exercise or, like, do it when you’re sitting in the salon chair, getting your hair done, right, whoever adding it in as part of a daily practice.
Abbey Daw 06:43
Oh, just like you would have your morning latte or tea. Like it literally takes two minutes to change your brain chemistry by breathing and firebreath. Or I do the subtle body breath, which I can tell you about later. I mean, it is literally a game changer.
Abbey Daw 07:01
Awesome. Yeah. And so you you really believe and part of your mission is that we can retrain our brains to breathe better?
Abbey Daw 07:12
Yes. 1000 million trillion percent yes.
Abbey Daw 07:18
Yes, I totally agree. And then, for my listeners, we’re really focusing on all of life like sex and sexiness to all of life – not just in the bedroom. But I’m curious to hear your thoughts ,Abbey, on how you experience that breath relates to a deeper sexuality, and a deeper connection to our own body, for example.
Abbey Daw 07:45
So this is a very beautiful part of my transformation story. I’ve always been an athlete, I’ve ran what feels like millions of marathons. And I am the person at the party that the dancing was really inhibited. I didn’t feel very sexual, and I didn’t want to dance in a group, and I didn’t want to feel as an embodied beautiful woman. In fact, I almost felt more like a girl. I feel like women, when they start their periods are not really taught how to transition into womanhood. We’re just like, “Oh, we have a period and now we feel all these things on our hormones”. So anyways, um, I dealt with that in the ways I did.
Abbey Daw 08:31
So in the pandemic I hired a coach to help me build a business. So the first thing that he said to me, and it’s a male figure in my life that I trust, and he said, “Hey, so you’re breathing?” And I said, “Yeah I’m breathing every day”. He’s like, “how about learning how to breathe back into your feminine energy and calm the things of your life” and he suggested that I could self-pleasure with breath. And start at the tip of your spine and start breathing this light up your spine. And meanwhile, I’m watching this thing on goop. It’s a Netflix documentary where Gwyneth Paltrow has this sex therapist on the show. This woman, she’s teaching you how to pleasure yourself while you breathe. And I was feeling really like, “Oh, I don’t want to go there. You know, it’s a little… um…. it’s weird. It’s uncomfortable for me to to pleasure myself”.
Abbey Daw 09:31
I didn’t even really know what feminine energy was. So then I started doing it. And I would do three minutes of fire breathing looking at my vision board. In fact, I just did it like two hours ago with three minutes looking at my vision board and then I turned on my favorite song. And I self-pleasured and instead of thinking of the visuals of someone else pleasuring me. My shadow work and my embracing all of my shadows and almost like I was pleasuring myself as if I’m the woman of my dreams. And then the orgasms have been out of this world – like I’ve never had orgasms like that, let alone say that on a podcast right now! And it does come down to the breath, because I felt like the breath made the orgasms better because I was focused on the breath. And then I come out and I turn on a song and I would just dance in my underwear. That’s what I did.
Abbey Daw 10:38
Amazing. It’s such an inspiration for all of our listeners. We talk about breath. And we talk about movement, right? Like you’re adding in dance, and in future episodes we’re gonna talk about vision boards and why they’re so powerful, but you’re really combining breath, self pleasure, dance, and vision boards all into one practice. That’s so fabulous.
Dr. Stormy 10:59
And I love what you said about being the woman of my dreams, right? I always say to my clients, I want you to be your own Beloved. For you to be truly your own Beloved. And then moving out from there, because you’re going to draw in a different Beloved, when you really love yourself in that way. So I love that practice. And thanks for being so brave in sharing it.
Abbey Daw 11:01
Yeah, I mean, I’m okay with it. Now. I mean, I am on a sex podcast. But I’m more me than I’ve ever been in my life. And I want women to feel more them than they’ve ever been in their life. And so if that means me talking about orgasms and sex magic… ok. I have attracted some awesome shit into my life by doing this!
Abbey Daw 11:47
That’s amazing. Fabulous. Awesome. So you said, Abbey, that you kept coming back to the breath or you keep coming back to the breath. So the breath is like a guiding light for you even in this self pleasure practice. How do you experience breath connecting you to your sexuality?
Abbey Daw 12:10
Because breath does. It does feel like it just shines. It shines a light on your inner body. It feels like every time I take a breath that I’m embodying more crooks and crannies of myself and sort of moving around the cobwebs, if that makes any sense? And then I just add more. So when you’re more embodied, you’re more in your sensuality because you don’t have any other energy in there that’s not yours. And so when you’re fully embodied then you feel more magnetic and then you feel more confident and even feel more sexual. And I feel like the way that I got there was because I breathed into myself and my body. Oh, breath is just so incredible! And we take our breath for granted but the breath is a medicator in a healthy way. It brings your life back and it is your life!
Dr. Stormy 13:06
I love that! Yeah, so I heard breath as an embodiment practice. And I’m gonna ask you to lead our listeners here in a breath practice in a moment. Also breath as a tool to bring you back to present moment, right? If I’m sticking with my breath then I’m not future tripping or past tripping. I’m in the present moment. I’m really feeling the sensations of my breath. And it’s so fabulous when you can find the pleasure in just breathing. You can really learn to luxuriate in the breath is so amazing. And I also love what you said about a deeper kind of breath and breathing into the cracks and crevices and nooks and crannies of our body, of our psyche, of our heart, and of our sex.
Dr. Stormy 14:04
Instead of just having the breath stay focused in the top third of our lungs, we’re really moving it physiologically and energetically into all the parts of our body. And when I’m working with clients and building that pleasure muscle, whether that’s sexual pleasure or not, it’s continuing to stay present with the pleasure, right? Even in pleasure, we tend to dissociate or we worry about our partner or we’re not really present with ourselves, we’re just kind of masturbating or whatever it might be. It’s really coming back to the present moment and really deeply being with the pleasure and sticking with the breath. Western sex teaches to clench and contract and constrict, and that’s what we do to and when in orgasm. And one of my missions is to teach people, and to practice myself, relaxing into pleasure, relaxing into orgasm, and I find the breath is so powerful to do that.
Abbey Daw 15:02
It gets you into that softness, and that receiving energy. It’s like we’re thinking about our partner and we want to pleasure them. But it’s like, you get to receive pleasure, too! And I do think it is about softening and receiving and that breath does that.
Dr. Stormy 15:26
Well, Abbey, would you mind leading our listeners in a short breath practice? And just for our listeners… if breathwork is new for you. Um, two things I would say is that, there’s alerting breaths and there’s calming breaths. And so we’ll see what Abbey chooses to lead us here in a moment. You can use your breath to wake up and invigorate and enliven yourself, and you can use your breath to drop into yourself to soften and to pause. There’s so many different kinds of breath. There’s so many different benefits of breath. But the second thing I want to say is if you’re listening or watching make sure you’re in a place that you can follow along with us safely that you are not driving or walking or running or whatever. I will add the timestamp of this breath practice in the show notes, so you can come back to it if you’re not able to join us right now. But even if you’re not able to join us right now, just hearing Abbey’s voice and just taking a moment to pause is so important and so transformative. So Abbey, I’m giving you the floor, and I’d love to have you lead us in a breath practice.
Abbey Daw 16:31
Okay, so this one’s a really good one. We have a right sided brain and a left sided brain, but it’s also right is masculine and the left is feminine. And we don’t realize sometimes that we’re not breathing up both nostrils in a clear way. And so this one is really good for calming because I feel like sometimes if we start off with the fiery stuff then people get a little overwhelmed. And I think this is a really really good place to start.
Abbey Daw 16:56
Because I believe that most people need relief from the fire and the world we’re in now. So you’re going to take your right hand and you want to always start with your left nostril open. This one is called alternate nostril breathing. So my first two fingers are tucked. And you always want to start with your thumb of your right hand just barely closing off the right nostril. So this represents the masculine side. And what this breath does is it actually balances out your masculine and feminine and it also brings in that creative energy and make you feel more clear and less brain fog. So also calming the nervous system as the parasympathetic nervous system activates. So your left nostril is open. And you’re going to exhale out your left all the way so any residual breath in the body. And then inhale back up your left. Now you’re gonna plug your left nostril along with your right but the left can be plugged with your ring finger.
Abbey Daw 18:08
Hold that. Now release the right. Exhale out the right nostril only. Inhale back up the right nostril.
Abbey Daw 18:22
Now Plug both. Now open up your left only exhale out your left. Inhale that stream back up your left. Now plug both nostrils. Now open up your right. Send that stream of breath out and now inhale back up. Plug both nostrils lightly. Release your left nostril exhale out your left. We’ll do one more round. Inhale back up left. Plug both. Now open up your right nostril and exhale out your right. Inhale, backup your right. Plug both. Open up your left and exhale out your left.
Abbey Daw 18:31
Now you could just release your right hand and you just take a moment here and you breathe in both nostrils and be aware of both nostrils. Notice the change and then exhale out either your nose or your mouth. Letting go through your shoulders and just ask you to take one more moment to notice how it feels now even with like a minute of breathing versus how it felt before just let it sink in. And then from here, you can just open your eyes. So that’s, that’s alternate nostril breathing and that you want to do a minimum of six rounds of that which is beginning and ending up the left. So once you do one round, then you’ll do five more.
Dr. Stormy 20:20
Okay, so alternate nostril breathing for at least six rounds. I feel more awake and grounded. I also feel more connected to you even virtually. That is so cool. Also, I noticed a difference in my nostrils. My left one is always sort of clogged. But by the end, both nostrils felt so open.
Abbey Daw 20:48
Yeah, good. People don’t realize what they don’t even realize. But until they start breathing better and then they notice instead of having judgment, you just notice the data and you’re like, “Okay, all right”. And you just continue to feel the effects of breath on your body.
Dr. Stormy 21:08
So so beautiful. Thank you! Every podcast episode, I give our listeners sexy homework -the best kind of homework. So for all of you listening or watching this week, your sexy homework before next week’s episode is going to be two things: 1) to be curious about your breath and to notice your breath. 2) And if you want to try the alternate nostril breathing that abbey did, that’s awesome. And definitely recommend that for sexy homework.
Dr. Stormy 21:42
And just to be curious about your breath. And be curious about the changes that happened in your body when you do just even a few minutes of good breathing. So that’s your sexy homework for this week. And Abbey, before we close, and we thank our listeners if you could let them know how they can find you and connect with you.
Abbey Daw 22:07
Thanks, Dr. Stormy. I am on Instagram @abbeydaw. And I also have a website www.abbeydaw.com. I also have a podcast called the Yeah podcast with two other fantastic people which we just had Dr. Stormy on and talked about her business. I also I hold these courses for women. And I have about 30 spots in every course. And I take you through 10 modules. And we literally learn how to breathe and meditate and transform our life in those 10 modules. If you wanted any information, you can check out my website.
Dr. Stormy 22:59
Awesome. And I’ll be sure to put all that information in the show notes. And if you’re local or Utah, I’m joining Abby for a mountain top meditation early morning course coming up here called magick on the mountain. So I highly recommend that as well if you are local. So thanks for being here.
Dr. Stormy 23:20
And to our listeners…. thank you so much for joining, watching or listening today and thank you for being brave in opening your heart to love deep!!
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