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.
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5 practicesTheme · Posture and how you carry yourself
How long you have · A minute
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…
When attention has nowhere to settle, give it something. A fixed point on the floor, the breath, the shape your hands are making, or the plain feel of the position you are in.
Which one you choose matters more than people expect. Focusing on the breath turns attention inward, and inward is the wrong direction for anyone…