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
60 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…
When you are flat rather than wound up, try this. Rub your palms together until they feel awake, let them rest, then breathe in as your arms lift and out as they lower, two or three times.
Sluggish, heavy, far away: those states rarely respond to more calming. A bit of friction in the hands, some movement through the arms and a fuller…
The fast forceful practices are not for everyone. With high blood pressure, heart trouble or glaucoma, leave them out and use the slow ones, which carry no such warning.
Rapid breathing with effort behind it raises pressure inside the chest, the head and the eyes for as long as you keep it going. The gentler lift,…
Any breathing instruction that reaches you through a screen or a book comes from someone who cannot see you. Keep the final say over what your body does.
Recorded instructions have to be general. You are the one who knows that your chest tightens on holds, or that counting makes you anxious. Treat each…
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,…
Allergies turn up more often alongside ADHD than chance would predict. Worth mentioning your allergy history at an assessment even when nobody asks, since the two seem to travel together.
The likeliest explanation is not that one causes the other. It is that some of the same underlying wiring makes both more likely in the same person.…
Some foods are formulated to be hard to stop eating. That is a design brief rather than a flaw in you, and it goes some way to explaining why one particular snack is the one you think about at eleven at night.
Knowing this moves the fight somewhere you can win it. Willpower at the moment of craving is a poor bet, and a decision made in the shop is a much…
Here is a question that costs nothing: has anyone in your family been told their vitamin D was low? It runs in families through genes, skin tone, where you live and how much time anyone spends outside.
The clinician telling this story found out only afterwards that his mother, father and brother had all been low. Nobody had mentioned it, because it…
Even where a herb has good evidence behind it, that evidence belongs to the plant and not to the bottle in your hand. Testing keeps turning up products that do not contain what the label says.
This part of the argument does not depend on whether herbal remedies work. You could accept every claim made for a plant and still be left with the…
Own brand products from large retailers were among the worst performers in these tests. A big name on the packet is not a quality check, however much it feels like one.
Own label goods are usually made under contract on thin margins with no independent verification of what comes out the other end. So the reassurance…
People often turn to herbal remedies hoping to avoid side effects. Plants are chemistry too, and some of them interact with prescribed medication in ways that matter.
A plant extract is not one substance, it is a mixture of many, which gives it more places to interact rather than fewer. Origin has nothing to do…
Around seven in ten people who use herbal products never mention it to their doctor. Not out of secrecy, mostly because a tea or a gummy does not feel like it belongs on a list of medications.
The useful move is to answer a wider question than the one you were asked. When someone asks what medication you take, tell them what else you take…
Your gut is not just plumbing. It makes many of the same chemicals your brain runs on and it is in constant conversation with your nervous system, which is part of why a bad stretch of digestion and a low mood so often turn up together.
If your stomach has been unsettled for weeks and your mood has slid over the same weeks, you do not have to work out which one is the real problem.…
Put a rubber band round your water bottle for each refill you want to get through today, and slide one off each time you finish it. Nothing to remember, nothing to buy, and you can see where you are at a glance.
Tracking anything in your head is hard when your head is already full, and harder still when concentration is one of the things that has taken a hit.…
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…
Before inviting anyone to turn attention to their body, ask first. How do you feel about trying this now, and would you like to?
The asking is part of the practice, not the preamble to it. Someone whose body was once not theirs to control needs the choice handed back in small…
A long body practice is a teaching version. In real life, take one small piece: just the feet, just the hands, just a minute of noticing.
Long stretches of inward attention can tip into flooding or into drifting off, and neither leaves you better than you started. A minute done often…
You do not need a diagnosis to be worth teaching this to. Something that takes seconds, costs nothing and travels with you is worth having before you need it.
Practise it on an ordinary day, sitting on the bus or waiting for the kettle, so your hands already know it when the day is not ordinary. That is…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…