Loading practices
Loading practices
Every practice in the library, in one list. Narrow it by how long you have, who it is written for, and where you are right now.
Talk first, move second. Ending a hard conversation with something physical gives the body a route back down.
This works for a therapy group and it works for an evening at home. Say the difficult thing, then walk, stretch, wash up, anything that puts you back…
Unstructured play in a big open space settles a child. A structured class teaches them how to be with other children. You want some of each, for different reasons.
If you only ever book the class, you take away the roaming that calms them down. If you only ever send them out to roam, they miss the taking turns…
Whatever gets you outside and quiet for a stretch of time counts. Fishing, sitting in a hide, weeding, waiting in the car park with the window down.
Nobody has to call it mindfulness for it to work like mindfulness. Hours of low demand attention outdoors, with nothing much required of you, is the…
Martial arts happen to bundle four useful things at once: hard physical work, a fixed structure, feedback in the moment, and a teacher who stays. That is why they suit restless minds so well.
Any one of those on its own helps a little. Together they cover the arousal, the shapelessness of time, the need for a reward that arrives today…
Looking for a whole subject rather than a single practice? Start from the nine areas.
A practice kept up for years stops being something you do and becomes part of who you are. That is when it no longer needs willpower.
People who started something physical as children and carried on often point to it as where their steadiness came from. The early years are the…