Your body

There is more than one way to feel your body. The outward senses, the inward signals like hunger and tension, and the sense of where your limbs are in space are separate channels, and on a hard day one of them will be easier than the others.

If tuning into your chest feels like too much, that is worth knowing rather than pushing through. You can go instead to what your feet are pressing…

Thirst, hunger, the ache of having sat too long: these are not nagging, they are instructions. When self-care keeps failing, it is often because the instruction never arrived.

People who have been through a lot sometimes stop registering the signal at all, and then eating, sleeping and resting all go sideways. If that is…

Your nervous system decides whether a room is safe before you have had a single thought about it. Tone of voice, a face, the way someone walks in: it reads all of that and answers underneath your awareness.

This is why you can leave a perfectly pleasant meeting wrung out, or take against someone who has done nothing you could point to. The reading is…

The reading happens without you, but you can catch up to it. Naming what your body has already concluded, out loud or in your head, is most of the work.

Something like: my shoulders came up when he walked in. That is all it needs to be. You are not deciding yet whether it was fair, you are bringing a…

An alarm system can be wrong in two directions. It can scream in a safe room, and it can stay silent somewhere it should not.

Most talk about trauma assumes the first: too much alarm, too often. But some people come out of hard years with the volume turned right down,…

You do not have to close your eyes. If keeping them open, soft and lowered, is what lets you stay in the room, that is the better version for you.

Closing your eyes takes away your ability to check the room, and for anyone whose body is used to watching, that costs more than it gives. Make it an…

Try going into the next few minutes without deciding in advance what will happen in them. Curiosity in place of prediction.

A mind used to danger plans constantly, because planning once kept you safe. Sitting somewhere ordinary and letting the next moment be unknown is…

The body answers in sensations, in pictures, in a mood that turns up without explanation. If no words come when you check in, nothing has gone wrong.

People often decide they are bad at this because they went looking for a sentence and found a tight jaw instead. The tight jaw is the answer. Take…

If a few quiet minutes with your body turn up an ache or a tightness you had not noticed before, the practice has not made things worse. It has shown you something that was already there.

This catches a lot of people out. They sit down hoping to feel calmer, meet a knot in the stomach instead, and decide the whole thing is not for…

If you keep falling asleep whenever you sit quietly, take it as news rather than as a failed attempt. Your body is telling you how tired it is.

Welcome the first few times. Being tired enough to drop off the moment nobody needs anything from you is worth knowing about, and the honest response…

If you are moving attention through the body, start at the feet and work up. Leave the throat, the chest and the face until last.

The far edges of the body carry less charge, so they are a gentle place to find your bearings. Include the back, which people tend to skip: attention…

There is a difference between watching your hand and being in your hand. See whether you can move from looking at a part of your body to living inside it.

Observing keeps a small distance, which is useful early on and can quietly become the whole practice. Inhabiting is the further step: filling the…

Sleeping until the middle of the afternoon, day after day, is usually not rest. It is closer to the body shutting down, and it tends to leave you flatter rather than restored.

The tell is how you feel on waking: real rest gives something back, while shutdown leaves the day already gone and you no better for it. Nudging the…

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…