Your body

With your eyes closed, bring to mind someone who is glad to see you, and let your face receive that look. A small smile usually arrives in the eyes on its own.

It can be someone you love, someone who loved you, a teacher from years ago, or an animal. The point is not the memory but the feeling of being…

Open your mouth and put on a big obvious fake yawn. More often than not a real one follows, and the soft palate lets go with it.

Yawns are catching, so if you are sitting with someone else one of you starting will usually set off the other. Let it be a proper one: jaw wide,…

Let the corners of your mouth lift about as much as they would if you had just remembered something mildly pleasant. Not a smile anybody would notice.

This comes from dialectical behaviour therapy, where it is used as a way of softening without pretending. You are not being asked to feel happy, and…

Let something out of your throat. A sigh, a groan, a hum, or the word for whatever is stuck, said aloud to an empty room.

It does not have to sound nice and it will not. Most of us learned early to go quiet when upset, so the throat becomes very good at holding. If a…

Closed eyes are optional. If closing them makes you anxious, or the inside of your head gets loud, open them and look around the room.

Name a few things you can see, listen for the furthest sound you can hear, notice any smell in the air. Looking outward like this is a way of…

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…

The first time you slow a rising panic with your own breathing, something changes that no amount of reassurance could have changed. You have evidence now.

Panic runs on the belief that the sensations are in charge and you are not. One demonstration to the contrary is worth more than a hundred…

Tap the fleshy outside edge of your hand and say something like: even though I feel this, I accept myself completely. Three times, in whatever words are actually true for you.

The shape of the sentence is the point. It names the problem and refuses to make your worth conditional on solving it, which is the exact opposite of…

Work one side of your face or body first, then stop and compare. The difference between the treated side and the untreated one is often surprisingly clear.

This is a useful trick if you tend to finish a practice thinking nothing happened. Rather than asking whether you feel better, which is a vague…

End by pressing your palms together and staying there a moment. Each hand is giving and being given to at the same time.

It is a small thing that lands hard for people who only know how to be the one who helps. Notice the warmth and the pressure and notice that you…

Finish by letting your eyes travel slowly from one side to the other a few times, open or closed, then bring them back to the middle and notice how you are.

The idea borrowed from EMDR is that this helps the calmer state settle in rather than evaporate at the door. Whether it does that is not established,…

The first twinge often brings back every previous episode with it, and that dread is not separate from the pain. Fear tightens the muscles and turns the volume up.

Catching the moment is what helps: this is the twinge, and here comes the film of the last three weeks I lost to it. You are not talking yourself out…

You are not trying to get calm here. You are trying to find out what is actually going on in you, and whatever turns up is the useful part.

If a practice becomes something you can pass or fail, it will quietly join the list of things you are bad at. So drop the target. Ask what you notice…

Most of us hold a whole day around the eyes without knowing it. Scrunch them shut, open them wide, then rest your fingertips lightly over them for a few breaths.

After that, try the small points: the spot between your eyebrows, your temples, the soft dip under each eye where the cheekbone begins. Press only as…

Slide one hand behind your head at the base of the skull and rest the other on your forehead. Let your hands take the weight for a minute.

The bony ridge at the back is where a lot of eye and neck strain gathers, and it rarely gets touched. Do not press or twist anything: just support,…

Find the soft place just under and behind your jaw, near your ears, and rest your fingers there. Then open and close your mouth slowly, slide the jaw forwards and back, and draw your chin gently towards your throat.

Jaws get held all day, often by the same hunched screen posture that pushes the head forward. Go slowly enough that nothing clicks or hurts. You may…

If you carry everything in your neck, that is not a separate problem from feeling on edge. The nerve that settles you passes right between the muscles that are gripping.

The ones you can feel most easily run from behind each ear down towards the collarbone, with more just behind them along the side. Rest a warm hand…

Put your right hand flat on your left upper chest, gather the skin gently and draw it downwards, then tilt your head and lift your left ear away from it. Hold there and wait.

You are making a long slow stretch up the front of the neck, not pressing on anything. Wait rather than count: somewhere in the next minute a deeper…

Do not put a clock on any of this. Stay with each position until your body asks for a deeper breath or produces a yawn, then move on.

Timing by the clock turns the practice into another task to be completed. Waiting for a signal teaches you what your own signs of release actually…

After the throat, go straight to the chest. Most people feel the two loosen together, and noticing that link teaches you something about your own wiring.

Sigh the throat open, then put both hands on your breastbone and let the breath drop lower. If you have ever had a lump in your throat and a…

Rest both hands on your chest, feel it lift and fall, and let the breath go low enough that your belly moves too. If someone you love turns up in your mind while you do it, let them stay.

Gratitude works here as well, as long as it is specific and true: one thing from today rather than a list you are supposed to produce. Pets count,…

Hands on your belly, breathe so that it moves, and listen. A gurgle down there is a real sign that you have stopped bracing.

Digestion is one of the first things to shut down when you feel under threat and one of the first to come back when you do not. That is why the noise…

Add one small thing, then stop and let it filter through. A stretch, a bit of self massage, then nothing at all for a moment.

The pause is not wasted time. It is where the change actually happens. Piling technique on technique floods a system that was already overloaded, and…

There is a real difference between a practice you add to your treatment and one you use in place of it. Massage, breathing, acupressure and the rest belong in the first group.

Nobody minds you tapping, stretching or seeing an acupuncturist. What matters is that none of it quietly takes the place of the medication, the…

One of the quiet gains from body practice is that you can feel more without having to do something about it straight away. The feeling arrives, you watch it, it passes.

That watching part is worth practising on small things: an itch you do not scratch, cold hands, mild boredom. Building room in ordinary moments means…

Words for feelings tend to arrive after the body has been noticed, not before. Find the sensation first, then see what it wants to be called.

Try it in that order: tight across the chest, hot in the face, heavy behind the eyes. Then a name, if one comes, and no forcing if it does not.…

Some situations do not move, and accepting that is itself a way of coping rather than a failure to cope.

Fighting an unchangeable thing adds a second layer of suffering on top of the first. Acceptance here does not mean approval or giving up on care. It…

Not all of this is a matter of how you say you feel. Breathing, exercise and hands on work shift things that can be measured from outside: heart rhythm, stress hormones, muscle tone.

That matters if you are the kind of person who suspects their own good moods, or if you have to make a case to a colleague who wants numbers. It also…

Tapping pairs light contact on acupressure points with saying the trouble out loud. The claims made for it run ahead of the evidence, and it is cheap, quick and safe enough to try.

The idea underneath is that you hold the distressing thing in mind while your body receives a steady, harmless signal at the same time. Whether the…

You choose what to work on and how big a piece of it. A sore shoulder, a low mood, the belief that you are too much: all of them are allowed, and so is starting small.

The useful phrase is whatever is standing in the way of you being all right just now. Some days that is a headache and some days it is the thing you…

The usual round runs inside eyebrow, outside eye, under eye, under nose, middle of chin, collarbone, under arm, with the top of the head if you want it. About five soft taps at each, naming the thing briefly as you go.

Nothing here should hurt. Fingertips, light, more of a tap than a knock. The practical value of a route like this is that your attention keeps moving…

What you started with often changes as you go. The headache becomes sadness, the irritation becomes fear. Follow the new thing rather than dragging the old one along.

Say what is there now and adjust your words to match it. A shift like that is usually the most interesting moment in the whole round, because…

Deep change tends to follow self acceptance rather than the other way round. Waiting until you have fixed the thing before you are allowed to be kind to yourself usually keeps the thing exactly where it is.

This shows up most clearly with eating, drinking, and everything else people do to manage a feeling. Shame makes the feeling worse, and the behaviour…

Instead of a diet, take one craving and stay with it: the food, the moment, the pull. Tap or breathe through it until the pull itself loosens.

Pick a single situation rather than a whole eating plan. Six in the evening, the cupboard, the third biscuit. Restriction tends to make the forbidden…

If tapping feels too jumpy, use the same face points differently. Feel for a tender spot inside the eyebrow, under the eye, or just below the cheekbone towards the nose, then make slow small circles there.

Vary it: lighter, then a little deeper, circling one way and then the other, and see which direction the tissue seems to prefer. Slow steady contact…

There comes a moment when the tissue under your fingers gives a little and allows more depth. Wait for that instead of pressing your way to it.

It sounds fanciful until you have felt it once, and then it is obvious. Rest your hand, keep the pressure steady, and let the softening decide the…

Pick one word for what is bothering you and let that word stand in for the whole thing while you do the soothing. You do not have to run the memory to work on it.

The word can be plain: the hospital, that message, Sunday. Bring it to mind once, then let it sit in the background while your hands and your…

Picture somewhere peaceful and then walk in it. Feel the ground under each foot, your legs moving, and count the steps up to twenty.

The counting keeps you there instead of drifting off, and the feet are the important part. A calm scene that stays a picture in your head does very…

Cross your hands to the opposite shoulders and stroke slowly down to your elbows and hands, like a hug you are giving yourself. Three to five strokes, unhurried.

Then, if you want the rest of it: from the middle of your forehead out to the temples and along the hairline to the ears, from the crown down towards…

Pain is rarely one thing. There is the raw sensation, the memory of every other time, how you feel about it now, whether you think you can cope, and what you conclude about yourself.

Pulling those apart is useful because they do not all move together. You may not be able to change the ache itself, and you can often change how…