Areas › Your body
Your body
You cannot think your way out of a body that is braced. This area starts there: the breath, the ground under you, moving, eating, resting, and the small physical things that change how the rest of the day lands.
What works for this
Working from the body first
A body that has not slept, eaten or moved has less left over for holding itself steady. Changing the state you are in is often faster than changing the thoughts you are having, and it is more reliable when you are already worn out.
One move, today
A long slow out breath, longer than the in breath, three times. The out breath is the part that does the work.
What matches
6 practicesWhen you are helping someone settle, put the technique in their hands rather than your own. They tap themselves, they set the pressure, they stop when they want to.
Being touched by someone else, even kindly and with permission, asks a lot of a person whose body has been handled badly before. Self-administered…
After you have tried something to settle, check: how here do you feel now, compared with before? Do not assume it worked just because it usually does.
This takes ten seconds and does two jobs. It tells you whether that particular thing is worth reaching for again, and it slowly trains you to notice…
On a video call, two things still work well: touching your own face gently, and rocking. Both are yours to do, and both are visible enough to be done together.
Distance takes away most of what one person can offer another physically, so it helps to know what survives it. A hand resting on your cheek, fingers…
What frightens a body is usually not how hard a thing is, it is having no way out. So put movement as an offer. If it feels alright, you might try lifting your arms.
The wording is doing quiet work here. Lift your arms, and see what happens if you lift your arms, are the same physical event, but only one of them…
Whatever a person walks in carrying belongs in the practice. The ache in the hip, the irritation, tears that arrive for no reason, the part that thinks all of this is nonsense.
Complex trauma teaches people to leave pieces of themselves at the door, and a yoga mat is an easy place to carry on doing exactly that, particularly…
Sometimes eyes water during body work with no sad thought attached to it. Nothing has gone wrong, and there is nothing that needs explaining.
If it happens to you, let it happen. If it happens to someone you are working with, say something plain and warm: that this is common, that they do…