Many clients come to me feeling tense and agitated, so I will often suggest a short breathing exercise to help settle you before we start a counselling session.

I can vary breathing exercises so they are tailored to your likes and dislikes. You can take them away and use them in between sessions as a tool to ease anxiety, help with depression, and increase your energy or focus. The more you engage with your breath in an interested way, the more it will support you when you are stressed or anxious.

Breathwork is scientifically proven to help your well-being in a variety of ways:

• If you slow your breath, you slow your heart beat down, which helps to calm your mind.
• If your breathing is deep and expansive, your blood receives more oxygen from the lungs, helping to nourish your body.

Here are two examples of breathing exercises that I sometimes practise with clients.

1. The breaking wave

My garden therapy room is near the beach in Hove and we can often hear the sea together.

Settle into your chair, get really comfortable. Allow your eyelids to soften. Observe your breathing, in and out through the nose. The nose acts as a natural air filter. As you observe the breath coming in, imagine a small wave getting bigger or cresting; then as you slowly exhale imagine this wave softly breaking onto a beach.

Continue to imagine a wave raising and breaking in synchronisation with each breath for a few minutes. If your mind wanders gently remind yourself to come back to the image of the movement of the wave. After a short while, cup your eyes and massage around them with your fingers before opening your eyes slowly.

2. Drawing a box

Get really comfortable in your chair, settle in. Gradually become aware of your breathing - watch how it comes in and out. Can you notice a flicker of space between the in breath and the out breath? It’s like a short pause. Your breath is in four parts:

1. Breathing in
2. pause
3. Breathing out
4. and pause again.

Now soften your gaze or close your eyes. Imagine a simple box drawn of 4 lines. Choose a colour for it.

In your mind, as you breathe in, imagine the left line going up. In the in between “pause” imagine the top line, as if you are drawing it across. Flow into the exhale and imagine the line going down on the right. Gently pause and imagine drawing the lower line of the box.

Come back to the left side or beginning of the box on your next inhale and draw the box again in your mind. Continue this visualisation a short while, each successive breath and its 4 parts may become slower and slower.

When you are ready, let the image go and finish by taking a long slow deep breath in and sigh it out through the mouth.