Your body

Keep one strong smell for when you have gone flat, lemon or peppermint, and one soft smell for when you are wound up, something like lavender. Smell asks nothing of you, which is its whole advantage.

Set this up in advance, because the moment you need it is the moment you will not feel like planning. A small bottle in a bag, a sprig in a pocket, a…

For coming down, something sweet taken slowly tends to help more than anything you chew: sipped through a straw, or let dissolve on the tongue. Nobody around you can tell you are doing it.

Slow sucking soothes in a way that goes right back to the first weeks of life, and it is quiet enough to use in a meeting, on a bus, in a waiting…

When you have gone flat and far away, chew something noisy or blow something: pretzels, raw carrot, bubbles, a slow puff at a candle flame. It lifts you without tipping you into panic.

Collapse does not respond to calming, since you are already too far down for that. What helps is work for the jaw and a long active out breath, both…

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…

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.…

Before you walk into a room with someone, ask what you are carrying in with you, and what you are likely to leave behind when you go.

State travels ahead of words. A hard conversation an hour ago, a bad night, a piece of news you have not dealt with: any of it will be in the room…

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…

Whenever you offer a standing practice, offer the seated version in the same breath, and mean it. Say plainly that people should look after their own bodies and change anything that does not suit them.

Say it before you begin, not afterwards, so that nobody has to interrupt to ask. If you cannot see the people you are guiding, say that too, and say…

When you sit down to breathe, notice your pelvis. Tucked hard under or tipped hard forward both squeeze the breath; somewhere in the middle lets the diaphragm move.

Rock gently forward and back a few times and stop where the breath feels easiest, rather than aiming for a posture that looks correct. You will…

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…

When you offer someone a practice, ask them to tell you if it did nothing, and mean it. Say out loud that plenty of these do not land.

People agree that things helped for all sorts of reasons: not wanting to seem difficult, not wanting to disappoint you, having learned long ago that…

If the word exercise makes you flinch, drop it. Say moving about, or getting out, and see whether a plan turns up.

For a lot of people that word carries school changing rooms and years of not keeping things up. Swap it and the list of things that count grows:…

Missing a day is not the end of the programme. You missed a day. Tomorrow you carry on.

The dangerous part is not the missed session, it is the story that follows it, the one where you have blown it so you may as well stop altogether.…

When you reach a goal, stop and let yourself register it before moving on to the next one. Otherwise you collect achievements and never feel any of them.

The pause can be tiny. Say out loud what you did, tell someone, sit with it for a minute, thank God for it. Racing straight on to the next target…

When you need to correct one person, say it to the room. Everyone gets the instruction and nobody gets the sting.

Good instructors do this without thinking: they see one child dropping their guard and say that everybody needs to keep their hands up. The teaching…

Use a timer you can see rather than a warning you have to remember. A dial that shrinks, or a light that goes from green to red, does the work that five more minutes never quite does.

Time is not something everyone feels passing. Turning it into something you can look at moves the job from guessing to seeing, which is much easier.…

One minute of moving between tasks. Star jumps, a lap of the corridor, anything that gets the blood going before you sit down to the next thing.

Classrooms that do this report smoother changeovers and better recall of whatever was just taught. The same trick works at a desk: end one job, move…

A silent room is not restful for everybody. If every cough and creaking knee pulls at you, ask for music or bring headphones with something plain in them.

Too little going on can be as unsettling as too much. A low steady sound covers the sudden little noises that keep snagging your attention. Some…

When someone describes a day like that, do not answer with a lecture on living better. Say that this is hard, and that you find parts of it hard too.

They have heard the virtue speech many times already and it has never once helped. Admitting that you also struggle to exercise, or to keep up with…

Notice one thing your body is telling you right now. Thirsty, needing the loo, shoulders up somewhere near your ears. That noticing is a skill and it does come back with use.

Long stretches of stress teach you to override the body's signals until you stop hearing them at all. Then hunger, tiredness and the early edge of…

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 you start paying attention to your body, things wake up. More feeling, a deeper breath, memories arriving sideways. That is the practice working, not the practice going wrong.

Say this at the start, not afterwards. People who were not told tend to decide the movement made them worse and stop, when what actually happened is…

You are not here for a longer hamstring. You are here for a nervous system that can change gear, work when work is needed and settle when it is not.

An ordinary class measures you against the shape, and that measuring is the same self driving that wore you out in the first place. The therapeutic…

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…

Say it, out loud if you can manage it: I am done for the day. A decision, rather than a slow guilty drift away from the desk.

The hours after a proper clocking off feel different from the same hours drifted into, even when nothing else about them changes. It does mean facing…

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,…

When the person in front of you starts yawning during body work, it is usually not boredom. Bodies yawn as they let go of what they were holding.

Say so out loud, because most people apologise for it and then clamp down on the very thing that was starting to shift. A simple 'that is a good…

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,…