Practices

Find the place that is always tight, your jaw, your shoulders, the top of your back. Take it over deliberately. Squeeze it harder than it holds itself, then let it go.

Do that a few times and something changes. The holding stops being weather that happens to you and becomes something you are doing, which means it 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…

Grounding and relaxing are two different prescriptions. A squat with your back against a wall puts you back into your legs. Deep guided rest takes you downwards. Reach for whichever one is missing.

When someone has gone numb or absent, often from the waist down, weight bearing work in the legs gives the body something loud and unmistakable to…

Sometimes the thing that stops your tears is an order somebody gave you decades ago, and you are the one carrying it out now. One woman found her father's words sitting behind a habit of wiping her face dry the moment she cried.

That is worth knowing because it changes who the rule belongs to. It was his voice, in her hands, running long after he had gone. Naming the source…

Whether a feeling is nowhere to be found or far too much, the questions are the same: what breath, what movement, what sentence, what person helps me stay with this?

Numbness and overwhelm look like opposites and they are both a problem of not being able to stay with the material. The same supports work in either…

Anger wants the body to do something, so let it. Breathe deeper and higher into the chest, stand up, press both palms hard into a wall, walk on the spot, push down through your feet.

Pressing against something solid gives the mobilisation an outlet with nothing broken and nobody hurt. Keep going until the charge drops a little,…

Some people are not frightened of a place or an animal. They are frightened of their own racing heart, their own tears, their own anger, and it behaves like any other fear: it grows on avoidance and shrinks on careful contact.

That framing is useful because it tells you what to do next. You do not have to understand where it came from before anything can change. What you…

If a movement keeps cutting a feeling short, work with the movement rather than the feeling. Stay with the dabbing of the eyes itself, slowly, and see what turns up.

The defence is usually easier to be with than the raw emotion, and it often carries the memory. Repeat it gently, notice the arm, the hand, the…

When one bit of you wants to let the feeling come and another bit is frightened of it, you are not being difficult. You are two things at once, and both of them have their reasons.

The frightened side is usually the one that kept you going for years, so shoving past it tends to make it dig in harder. It works better to turn…

With your eyes closed, bring to mind someone who is glad to see you, and let your face receive that look. A small smile usually arrives in the eyes on its own.

It can be someone you love, someone who loved you, a teacher from years ago, or an animal. The point is not the memory but the feeling of being…

Let something out of your throat. A sigh, a groan, a hum, or the word for whatever is stuck, said aloud to an empty room.

It does not have to sound nice and it will not. Most of us learned early to go quiet when upset, so the throat becomes very good at holding. If a…

Closed eyes are optional. If closing them makes you anxious, or the inside of your head gets loud, open them and look around the room.

Name a few things you can see, listen for the furthest sound you can hear, notice any smell in the air. Looking outward like this is a way of…

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…

The first time you slow a rising panic with your own breathing, something changes that no amount of reassurance could have changed. You have evidence now.

Panic runs on the belief that the sensations are in charge and you are not. One demonstration to the contrary is worth more than a hundred…

Tap the fleshy outside edge of your hand and say something like: even though I feel this, I accept myself completely. Three times, in whatever words are actually true for you.

The shape of the sentence is the point. It names the problem and refuses to make your worth conditional on solving it, which is the exact opposite of…

The first twinge often brings back every previous episode with it, and that dread is not separate from the pain. Fear tightens the muscles and turns the volume up.

Catching the moment is what helps: this is the twinge, and here comes the film of the last three weeks I lost to it. You are not talking yourself out…

Slide one hand behind your head at the base of the skull and rest the other on your forehead. Let your hands take the weight for a minute.

The bony ridge at the back is where a lot of eye and neck strain gathers, and it rarely gets touched. Do not press or twist anything: just support,…

Add one small thing, then stop and let it filter through. A stretch, a bit of self massage, then nothing at all for a moment.

The pause is not wasted time. It is where the change actually happens. Piling technique on technique floods a system that was already overloaded, and…

Some situations do not move, and accepting that is itself a way of coping rather than a failure to cope.

Fighting an unchangeable thing adds a second layer of suffering on top of the first. Acceptance here does not mean approval or giving up on care. It…

You choose what to work on and how big a piece of it. A sore shoulder, a low mood, the belief that you are too much: all of them are allowed, and so is starting small.

The useful phrase is whatever is standing in the way of you being all right just now. Some days that is a headache and some days it is the thing you…