Long Exhale
Thirty-five minutes at lunchtime, sitting upright, working only on the back half of the breath. In at your desk by two.
The shortest class we run, and the only one done sitting in a chair. You will not lie down, you will not get warm, and you will not need to shower afterwards. Tomáš starts at 13:10 on the dot and finishes at 13:45 on the dot, because the whole point is that it fits inside the hour you already have.
The idea, in one line
Almost everybody under stress breathes in fine and breathes out badly — short, clipped, already reaching for the next one. Fixing the inhale does nothing. Doubling the exhale does a great deal.
4 seconds in, 8 seconds out. One cycle is 12 seconds, about 5 breaths a minute.
What actually happens
Ten minutes of finding where your exhale currently stops, which for most people is about two-thirds of the way through. Fifteen minutes extending it a count at a time, with Tomáš conducting — literally conducting, one hand, the way you would hold a choir through a long phrase. Ten minutes of letting it settle back to something you could do on a train.
Fair warning
Long exhales at this ratio make some people lightheaded in the first two or three sessions. That is normal, it passes, and the instruction when it happens is always the same: stop counting, breathe however you like, rejoin when you want to. Nobody will look at you. Nobody is keeping score — there is nothing here to keep score with.