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
14 practicesThe 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…
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…
A child cannot watch their own breathing, so give them something to watch instead. Bubbles through a wand show the out breath as it happens: too hard and it bursts, too weak and nothing comes.
Smelling a flower and then blowing it out gives each half of the breath a picture. The bubble wand is better still, because it answers back straight…
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…
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…