Your body

Sound that repeats slowly, waves, rain, steady recitation, brings you down. Fast, loud, unpredictable music, or whistling, brings you up.

Have both ready before you need them, one playlist for each direction. Whistling is worth knowing about because it does two jobs at once, lifting you…

Steady pressure suits both directions. A weighted blanket, a firm squeeze of your own hands, lotion rubbed in with real pressure, bare feet pressed into the floor.

This is the one thing on the list that works whether you are wound up or gone flat, which makes it a good default when you cannot tell which you are.…

To come down, move slowly and rhythmically: rock, sway, walk at half speed. To come up, move properly: jog on the spot, jump, dance fast, or carry something heavy.

Heavy work is the interesting one, because it settles as well as it lifts. Carrying the shopping in one trip, shifting furniture, pushing hard…

Let the breath go along with the movement rather than counting it out. If you are guiding someone, do not set the pace of their breathing for them.

Being told exactly when to breathe in and out is unpleasant for more people than you would expect, and for anyone whose breath was held tight through…

When you are low, the thing most likely to help is the thing you have least appetite for. Make the first step small enough that appetite is not required.

Getting as far as the front door can be the whole task on a bad day. Standing up, putting your shoes on, then deciding, is a fair plan. Anyone…

A movement practice comes apart into pieces: the shapes, the breathing, the noticing. On a day when the whole thing is beyond you, take one piece.

Just the breathing, sitting where you already are, is a practice. So is one stretch held for a minute. Doing a fragment keeps the thread going, and…

Moving your body is not a pleasant extra alongside the proper treatment for low mood. It has been tested as a treatment in its own right and it holds up.

This matters most when you are already doing other things and still struggling. Walking, cycling, swimming, anything that lifts your heart rate for a…

You do not have to walk into a room full of strangers for this to work. The moving and the attention are the active parts, and both travel happily to your living room.

Group classes suit some people and cost others far more than they give. A video at home, a quiet corner, the same fifteen minutes, all of it counts.…

Some of what you are carrying has not finished happening. Movement that soothes rather than pushes tends to suit that better than anything strenuous.

Advice built around a danger that has passed does not fit a person still meeting it weekly, whether that is racism, an unsafe household or work that…

If talking about it has not shifted things, a body based practice is worth trying next. It is not a consolation prize.

Some of what trauma leaves behind sits underneath words: the flinch, the going blank, the pull towards hurting yourself. Practices that work through…

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…

When attention has nowhere to settle, give it something. A fixed point on the floor, the breath, the shape your hands are making, or the plain feel of the position you are in.

Which one you choose matters more than people expect. Focusing on the breath turns attention inward, and inward is the wrong direction for anyone…

Find the place that is always tight, your jaw, your shoulders, the top of your back. Take it over deliberately. Squeeze it harder than it holds itself, then let it go.

Do that a few times and something changes. The holding stops being weather that happens to you and becomes something you are doing, which means it is…

Keeping your eyes open holds you in the room while you feel what is going on inside. One channel on where you actually are, one on yourself.

Closed eyes are the default in most classes and they are not always kind. When a lot is stirring, letting the eyes stay soft but open, so the light…

Grounding and relaxing are two different prescriptions. A squat with your back against a wall puts you back into your legs. Deep guided rest takes you downwards. Reach for whichever one is missing.

When someone has gone numb or absent, often from the waist down, weight bearing work in the legs gives the body something loud and unmistakable to…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Ordinary harmless sensation competes with pain on its way up. Rubbing, squeezing or stroking near a sore place gives the nerves plenty of other traffic to carry.

This is why everybody rubs a banged elbow without being taught to. The useful part is that you can do it deliberately: firm strokes along the limb, a…

If pain is the thing you live with, start the session with the stroking sequence rather than the conversation. Arms, forehead, crown, cheeks, slowly.

It does two jobs in one go: gentle wide contact takes some edge off the pain, and it brings a person out of guarded alertness into being able to…

Squeeze slowly down one arm with the opposite hand, then the other, and work over whatever muscles you can reach. No table, no appointment, nobody else in the room.

Firm and rhythmic beats fiddly. Give the forearms, upper arms, shoulders and thighs a proper squeeze and release, a few seconds each. Doing it…

Not every kind of quiet is calm. Settled feels warm and present. Shut down feels flat, far away and oddly fine.

Learning the difference in your own body is worth the trouble, because the two states need opposite things. If you are settled, stay there. If you…

Before picking a calming technique, work out which way you are off. Revved up and shut down need opposite things.

Wound up: slow the out breath, lower the lights, less input. Shut down: more input, movement, sound, a change of room. The common mistake is running…

Try saying it plainly, out loud if you can: my body did what it needed to do, and I am still here.

Say the specific version rather than the general one. My body went still so it would be over sooner. My body kept quiet so it would not be noticed.…