Your body

The famous count is not automatically your count. One teacher finds that adding a pause after the inhale wakes her up, while the plain long exhale has her asleep within three breaths.

Protocols get passed around because they worked for someone, often someone with a large audience. That is not the same as fitting you. Keep the shape…

Breath is the quickest way you have of turning your own nervous system up or down. Nothing else you can simply decide to do works on that timescale.

Your heart rate already rises slightly as you breathe in and falls as you breathe out, on every breath. So changing how you breathe changes something…

The rapid belly driven breath with pauses added is the strongest thing in this set. Not for high blood pressure, glaucoma, pregnancy or your period, and stop at once with pain or dizziness.

It has its uses for the flat, heavy state that comes over people after lunch or during a long low patch, because it pushes upwards rather than down.…

End a practice with a question rather than a conclusion. What do you notice works better than telling someone what should have happened.

If you announce that an exercise is calming, most people will agree with you whether or not it was. Asking leaves room for the honest answer,…

Put a hand just below your ribs and let it move. Most of us breathe up in the chest, and the settling effect comes from lower down, where the diaphragm can actually shift.

You can check this lying down with a book on your stomach. If the book rises, the breath is going where you want it. If only your shoulders move, it…

There is no breath that calms everyone. The one that settles your friend may leave you worse, and that is information about your body rather than a failure in you.

Labels like calming or energising are a rough guide at best. What actually happens depends on how you usually breathe, what your body has been…

Start with a count of four in and four out, then drop the count. Once the rhythm is there your body will choose its own length: six and six, eight and eight, whatever settles you.

The count is scaffolding. Holding onto it too long turns the practice into something you can pass or fail, which is the opposite of the point.…

Four in, hold four, four out, hold four. The holds are the strong part of this one, and they stay optional every single time.

Some people find the pauses deeply settling. Others meet the edge of what they can tolerate there, especially at the bottom of the exhale. Both are…

Rather than pulling in a big breath, breathe gently and slightly less than you want to, then wait. The deep breath that arrives by itself does more than the one you force.

Keep the breathing light and unhurried, and after a while a mild hunger for air builds. Let it build a little. At some point the body takes a fuller…

Holding your breath for a moment makes the next one deeper, which sounds backwards until you know why. The urge to breathe is driven by carbon dioxide, not by a shortage of air.

Sensors in the brainstem watch the level of carbon dioxide in your blood, and a pause, especially after breathing out, lets it rise a little. The…

The three ordinary breaths between rounds are not a gap in the practice. They are where you find out what the practice did.

Come back to normal breathing and check the body, the thoughts, the mood, the energy. Do not analyse it, just register it. Going round after round…

To find the soft ocean sounding breath, breathe out through your mouth as if fogging up a mirror. Then keep that same slight narrowing at the throat with your mouth closed, and let the sound get quieter and quieter.

Starting with the mirror gives you something to do instead of an anatomy lesson about a part of the throat you cannot see. Once the mouth closes, the…

Close your right nostril with your thumb and breathe in through the left. Swap fingers at the top, breathe out through the right, in through the right, then out through the left. That is one round.

The fiddliness is not a flaw in the design. Keeping track of which nostril and which stage takes up just enough of your mind that there is little…

These practices are not only pleasant. They change things you could measure, which is worth knowing on the days when pleasant is not reason enough to bother.

Yoga and breath work tend to get filed under relaxation, and that undersells them. There are claims made about them shifting the chemistry involved…

Go slowly enough to learn something about yourself, rather than only a technique. What is worth keeping is knowing which breath does what in your body.

One round is rarely enough to tell. Try a breath for a minute or two, stop, and check what shifted: the chest, the shoulders, how loud your thoughts…

There are two skills here rather than one: letting your body move and settle in its own way, and being able to steer yourself deliberately towards rest or alertness. It is worth having both.

Most people are strong in one and shy of the other. If you always take charge, your body never gets to finish anything on its own. If you only ever…

How often you actually do it matters more than which version you chose. The people who keep turning up tend to get more out of it, and those who carry on at home get more again.

This is quietly encouraging, because an unimpressive practice done regularly beats an ideal one you manage twice. It also sets the expectation…

Part of why martial arts suit some people has little to do with the kicking. Every session opens with a plan and closes with a look back at what happened and what comes next.

Those brackets at each end are doing quiet work: planning, then reviewing, then planning again, which are exactly the things that are hard to hold in…

Stand on one leg for a few breaths. Your body has to work to keep you upright, and that work is loud enough to feel on a day when nothing else registers.

Balance pulls in the joints, the inner ear and the muscles all at once, so it gives a far stronger signal than sitting still and hoping to notice…

There is more than one way to feel your body. The outward senses, the inward signals like hunger and tension, and the sense of where your limbs are in space are separate channels, and on a hard day one of them will be easier than the others.

If tuning into your chest feels like too much, that is worth knowing rather than pushing through. You can go instead to what your feet are pressing…

If you are going to bring attention to your body, start with where your body is rather than what it feels. Feet on the floor, back against the chair, the weight of your hands in your lap.

Attention to the inside, the chest, the stomach, the throat, sits close to the emotional wiring and can open more than you meant to open. Position in…

Your nervous system decides whether a room is safe before you have had a single thought about it. Tone of voice, a face, the way someone walks in: it reads all of that and answers underneath your awareness.

This is why you can leave a perfectly pleasant meeting wrung out, or take against someone who has done nothing you could point to. The reading is…

The reading happens without you, but you can catch up to it. Naming what your body has already concluded, out loud or in your head, is most of the work.

Something like: my shoulders came up when he walked in. That is all it needs to be. You are not deciding yet whether it was fair, you are bringing a…

An alarm system can be wrong in two directions. It can scream in a safe room, and it can stay silent somewhere it should not.

Most talk about trauma assumes the first: too much alarm, too often. But some people come out of hard years with the volume turned right down,…

One question does a lot of work: is what my body is doing right now a fair match for what is actually in front of me? Ask it plainly, and let the answer be either yes or no.

The point is not to talk yourself out of the feeling. The signal is information and it deserves a hearing. But you can hold it up against the room…

If talking about feelings has always felt foreign or a bit embarrassing, treat this as a once a day checklist instead. Five boxes, no discussion, nothing to perform.

Plenty of people who go blank at how are you feeling can tell you straight away whether their shoulders are tight or their breathing is shallow.…

Ask who you are today and what body you are living in today, and let the answer be different from yesterday's. You are more fluid than solid.

Hard experience tends to freeze a person into a description: the damaged one, the difficult one, the one who cannot cope. Asking the question daily…

Before twisting, draw your belly gently in towards your spine. It looks after your lower back, and it is worth feeling for its own sake: you steady the middle before you turn towards anything.

The physical version is simple. A light drawing in of the abdomen, not a clench, held while you rotate and released as you come back. The felt…

Offer any movement in three sizes: small, medium and full. Let people take the one that fits today, and let them change their mind halfway through.

For a twist that might be a simple reach, or a reach with the other hand placed behind, or loose swinging arms. The three sizes do quiet work. They…

Learn one plain standing position and keep coming back to it: feet under hips, hips under shoulders, ears above shoulders, chin drawn back a little, arms hanging.

The point is not that this posture is correct. It is that having one shape you return to gives you something to measure by, so you can tell that…

Your eyes are an input too. A photo of someone who loves you and a plain soft coloured wall will settle you; a busy bright screen will lift you.

Hardly anyone thinks to arrange what is in front of them, and it is one of the easier things to change. Put a picture where you actually sit. Turn…

Once a day, run through five things in order: how your mind is, what your body feels, how the breathing is going, what the emotional weather is, and how much energy you have. Curious, not marking yourself.

The order matters more than the answers do. Without a set path, checking in with yourself slides easily into chewing over the same worry, and you…

The same check-in can take two minutes or fifteen. Match the length to the day you are actually having, not to the version you were taught.

A long deep look inward is not always the better one. On a day when you are already far from yourself, going deeper can take you further out rather…

Finish a check-in by asking what actually brought you here. Not the task in front of you, the thing underneath it that you want.

Noticing how you are can leave you sitting in it. One more question turns it outward: what am I hoping for, what am I moving towards. It might be…

Take the spine through all six of its movements: forward, back, bending to each side, turning to each side. Standing or sitting, it takes under five minutes.

Doing the whole set matters more than doing any one of them beautifully. Left to ourselves we skip the direction that feels stiff or guarded, and…

Posture does not only show what you feel, it decides what you can feel. Anger is very hard to reach with a collapsed chest, and grief is hard to reach when you are held rigidly upright.

If a feeling seems to be nowhere at all, look at the shape you are sitting in before deciding it is absent. Let the chest open a little, or let a…

Once a movement is familiar, drop the pattern. Let it curve and wander towards wherever your body seems to want it, rather than doing it correctly.

Following instructions well is a skill many people learned early, sometimes because it was not safe to do anything else. A practice made entirely of…

Instead of breathing deeply in general, pick the place that feels tight, the front of the ribs, the chest, one shoulder, and send the breath there.

You are not really moving air into your shoulder, but putting your attention there while you breathe does two things: you start to feel that area in…

After movement, take a moment on five things: the quality of your mind, of the sensation in your body, of your breathing, of your mood, and of your energy.

Doing this after moving rather than before gives you something to notice, since the body has just changed. Over time it builds a vocabulary. People…

End a check-in with a question rather than a summary: what do I need in order to be properly here today?

Noticing your state can leave you stuck in reporting on yourself. The need question turns it into something you can act on, and the answer is often…