Practices

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…

Trace a slow circle with your finger, on your knee or in the air, once a day. One a day is the whole prescription, which is why it survives contact with real life.

A small movement done daily becomes a handle. After a few weeks the gesture starts to bring a little of the settled state with it, and you can use it…

An open hand has meant coming unarmed for a very long time. If that meaning does something for you, keep it. If it does not, the gesture still works.

Some people find a practice sticks better when it stands for something they already care about, like refusing to cause harm, or showing up with…

The out breath is the part that quiets things down. Cells in the brain's alarm centres behave differently across the two phases of a breath, and breathing out is the calming side of that cycle.

This is why nearly every breathing technique that works has a long exhale somewhere inside it. You do not need the anatomy to use it, but knowing why…

You may hear that humming floods you with nitric oxide and drops your blood pressure. Humming does raise nitric oxide in the nose. The rest of that sentence is a leap.

It is worth being careful with this, because a practice sold on a dramatic mechanism gets dropped when the mechanism turns out to be shaky. Hum…

Say out breath, not breath. Told to take a signal breath, most people pull air in hard, which stirs them up rather than settling them.

This is a small wording change that decides whether the technique works. Whether you are teaching someone else or reminding yourself, put the phase…

Find a photograph of someone caught unguarded, ashamed or frightened or relieved, and look at it for a while. Notice what happens in your chest and around your own eyes.

Most of the time we glance at a face and move straight on. Holding your gaze long enough for something to stir is a small test of whether the feeling…

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…

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…

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…