Your body

The 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,…

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…

Hot yoga asks you to keep drinking all the way through the class. If forgetting to eat and drink is one of your regular problems, choose a different room.

This is not about the style being bad. It is about matching what you choose to the things you genuinely find hard. Dehydration creeps up quietly and…

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.…

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…

The three ordinary breaths between rounds are not a gap in the practice. They are where you find out what the practice did.

Come back to normal breathing and check the body, the thoughts, the mood, the energy. Do not analyse it, just register it. Going round after round…

To find the soft ocean sounding breath, breathe out through your mouth as if fogging up a mirror. Then keep that same slight narrowing at the throat with your mouth closed, and let the sound get quieter and quieter.

Starting with the mirror gives you something to do instead of an anatomy lesson about a part of the throat you cannot see. Once the mouth closes, the…

Close your right nostril with your thumb and breathe in through the left. Swap fingers at the top, breathe out through the right, in through the right, then out through the left. That is one round.

The fiddliness is not a flaw in the design. Keeping track of which nostril and which stage takes up just enough of your mind that there is little…

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…

A good instructor says light, moderate, heavy. A poor one says set the dial to three. Only one of those takes account of the body you actually brought with you.

Fixed settings guarantee that somebody in the room is working far too hard and somebody else is barely working at all. If you tend to go flat out and…

Heading towards the shape is the whole job. A perfect triangle is not what the pose is for, and nobody is marking it.

Perfectionism and going too hard tend to travel together, and between them they produce most of the injuries and most of the quitting. If you are…