Practices

If a child is climbing the walls, green space helps most, a walk down a busy street helps a bit, and staying in the room helps least. Any of the three beats none.

The research on this puts them in that order rather than saying only a forest will do. A park, a scruffy playing field, the bit of grass behind the…

Bolt the movement onto something you would want to do anyway. A game with a friend, a walk to somewhere with good coffee at the end, a route past the river.

People keep up a weekly game with a mate for forty years and never once call it exercise. The friendship is what they turn up for and the moving…

Clumsy is not a description you can work with. Balance, core strength, shifting your weight, big movements, small ones, catching a ball, keeping a beat: those you can look at one at a time.

Break it down and you usually find a child is fine in four of those and struggling in two. That turns a vague sense that they are awkward into…

Not every family can get occupational therapy. Almost anyone can get outside with a skipping rope, a long rope turned by two people, or a board.

Skipping and boarding ask for much of what a therapist would be working on anyway: both sides of the body keeping time with each other, judging the…

Children need to move before school, during it and after it. Keeping a child in at break until the work is finished takes the movement away from the very child whose finishing depended on it.

Break time is not the whole of it either. A few minutes on their feet between lessons, a walk before the day starts, something physical when they…

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…

For a child having a hard time, one adult who plainly thinks well of them makes more difference than almost anything else. A coach or a teacher can be that person.

Studies of children growing up through poverty, hunger and worse keep landing on the same finding: those who did well usually had somebody who…

With a small child who is struggling with both movement and speech, start with the body. Balance and steadiness come before a child can take in much language or learning.

A child who is using most of what they have simply to stay upright in a chair has little left for the words on the page. Sorting out the physical…

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…

Keeping your eyes open holds you in the room while you feel what is going on inside. One channel on where you actually are, one on yourself.

Closed eyes are the default in most classes and they are not always kind. When a lot is stirring, letting the eyes stay soft but open, so the light…

Play belongs here. Being a lion, a tree, a hissing snake, the way children do it with no embarrassment at all.

A lot of people meet trauma work as something solemn, and solemn is easy to sit through without ever softening. Silliness is harder to fake. If a…

When you are already behind, rest feels like the one thing you cannot afford. That feeling is usually what keeps you behind.

Running from one near disaster to the next burns exactly the abilities you need in order to dig out: planning, holding a thought long enough to use…

There are two jobs here, not one. Free up the time, and then be able to sit in it without feeling like a fraud.

Working more efficiently buys hours back, and that is the easier half. The harder half is the belief that rest is only for people who have finished…

Sometimes eyes water during body work with no sad thought attached to it. Nothing has gone wrong, and there is nothing that needs explaining.

If it happens to you, let it happen. If it happens to someone you are working with, say something plain and warm: that this is common, that they do…

You rarely need the whole tour. Pick the one place the tension actually lives for this person today, and work there.

A real session has no room for a long sequence and no need of one. Watch where the holding shows itself: a jaw that never rests, shoulders up near…

Keep offering these small practices and people start asking for them. When someone requests one by name, something has changed about who is running their regulation.

Responses also speed up with repetition, so what needed ten minutes in the first month can take two later on. Name that shift out loud when it…

If pain is the thing you live with, start the session with the stroking sequence rather than the conversation. Arms, forehead, crown, cheeks, slowly.

It does two jobs in one go: gentle wide contact takes some edge off the pain, and it brings a person out of guarded alertness into being able to…