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
46 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…
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,…
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…
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…
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.…
When you find yourself reaching for something sweet again, try asking what the reaching is doing for you instead of telling yourself off. Comfort, a small rebellion, a way to stay awake: the answer usually points somewhere useful.
Talk about being good or bad closes the conversation down. Curiosity keeps it open, and it tends to surface the actual job the food is doing, which…
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…
Say it plainly whenever you teach anything: the way I am showing you this is not the way it has to be done. Change it until it works for you.
Anyone who has failed at the standard version of something several times will not try again unless they are told clearly that adapting it is allowed.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
Most of the traffic on the nerve joining your gut, heart and lungs to your brain is heading upwards. When your stomach turns or your chest tightens, your body is reporting in.
It helps to treat those sensations as messages rather than faults to be got rid of. Next time your stomach drops before a difficult phone call, try…
You can tell you are settled by small signs: your breath sits low in your belly, feelings arrive in waves rather than floods, and you can think and feel at the same time.
Other markers: your voice has some tune in it, you can take in new information, you can read what is happening on someone else's face. Knowing your…
You will stop doing this once you feel better. Write it on your list of things that help, so it is there next time instead of forgotten.
Adherence fades the same way it does with exercise, and the fading is not a character flaw. The trouble is that when you next need it you will be in…
A gut feeling is a real signal rather than a turn of phrase. The chemicals that carry emotion in your brain are also at work in your heart and your gut.
This matters most if you grew up being told your read on a situation was wrong. Noticing the sensation, naming it, then checking it against what you…
The calm and connected part of this system speaks through your face, your voice, your ears and your heart. That is why those are the places to work.
A softer face, a slower voice, unhurried breathing and something friendly to look at are not decoration. They are the reachable end of the circuit…
The way you sound reaches people more directly than what you say. There is a pathway that tunes the ear towards the human voice, and a warm, unhurried voice uses it.
Worth knowing whether you are the one speaking or the one listening. If you are settling a child or a friend, let your voice go slower and softer and…
Breathing that has gone almost invisible happens in both kinds of stillness, so it will not tell you which one you are looking at. Muscle tone will.
Look at the jaw, the hands, the shoulders, the way the body is being held in the chair. Tight and set is one thing. Slack and heavy is another. You…
Stand on one foot for half a minute, a hand on a chair if you need it, and put all your attention into the foot on the floor.
You will find it is never still. There is a constant small negotiation towards the toes, the heel, one side and back again, and every so often you…
Try locking your ankle and holding everything rigid while you balance. You will fall over. The wobble was doing the work.
People who are frightened of losing control often try to hold themselves regulated: clamped, monitoring, allowing no drift. It is exhausting and it…