Practices

Every practice in the library, in one list. Narrow it by how long you have, who it is written for, and where you are right now.

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1384 practices

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Body based practices sit alongside medication rather than replacing it. If you take something, you can do both.

They are worth having on the menu for people who cannot take medication, do not want to, or want something of their own to do as well. The skill you…

Five minutesYour nervous systemBody basedQur’an 106:4

None of this needs explaining to work. A child who cannot say what happened can still be helped by breath, movement and sound.

That makes body based work useful right across the ages, and for anyone who finds talking hard, including people whose language is not the one the…

Five minutesYour nervous systemBody basedQur’an 16:78

When someone cannot take in your reassurance while they are frightened, that is the receiver and not their willingness. Wait for the wave to pass and try again.

In high arousal, hearing shifts away from the band the human voice occupies, so kind words can genuinely arrive as noise. It is easy to read that as…

Five minutesYour nervous systemBody basedQur’an 20:46

A healthy heart rate is not a metronome. The small variations between beats are a sign your body can still adjust to what is in front of it.

Heart rate variability is exactly that: how much the gaps between beats change. More of it generally goes with a system that can speed up when needed…

Five minutesYour nervous systemBody basedQur’an 25:47

Rest your attention in the middle of your chest, let your breath slow as though it were moving in and out through there, and bring to mind something you feel warmly about.

Looking for a whole subject rather than a single practice? Start from the nine areas.

Grounding and settling

Growing empathy

The cost of avoiding

Structure and routine

Food, caffeine and fuel

What worry does

Practising under provocation

Cool the body first

Emotions as signals

Treatment and medication

Making it stick

Breathing

What you are actually defending

Being seen and judged

Righteous anger and perfectionism

Shame and stigma

Breaking the worry loop

Feeling from the inside

When anger turns to harm

When you use something to cope

Reading, numbers and learning differences

Remembering to do it

Facing it a step at a time

Tolerate distress

Self-compassion

Anger, alcohol and the body

Use your strengths

Obsessions and compulsions

Posture and how you carry yourself

Living with uncertainty

A hand on your chest can help you find the place. The feeling does not have to be big: gratitude for something small, or the ordinary fondness you…

Five minutesYour nervous systemBody basedQur’an 13:28

Slow breathing on its own does less than slow breathing with a warm feeling attached and something showing you how you are doing.

That is the difference between the deep breathing most people have tried and found underwhelming, and this. The feedback matters because otherwise…

Five minutesYour nervous systemBody basedQur’an 2:152

Keep the explanation short when you offer this to someone. It is a way of breathing that gets your heart to send your brain a message to settle. Would you like to try it?

Long technical framings cost more than they buy. They ask a person to take in a great deal before they have felt anything, and the offer of a choice…

Five minutesYour nervous systemBody basedQur’an 7:205

Practise this when you are calm and again when you are wound up. The second one is what makes it available in the moment you need it.

Skills learned in one state can be strangely hard to find in another, which is why people say they forgot to use it. Do the first round with someone…

Five minutesYour nervous systemBody basedQur’an 33:41

A skill that lives in your own body and your own phone stays with you after the appointments stop. That is worth choosing for.

Plenty of what helps during treatment ends when the relationship does. This does not. People often say afterwards that the breathing thing was the…

Five minutesYour nervous systemBody basedQur’an 50:16

Three minutes of slow breathing between one person and the next is not a break. It is part of the work.

Whoever you sit with next is reading your state before they hear a word of what you say, so arriving settled is a professional act rather than a…

Five minutesYour nervous systemBody basedQur’an 94:3

Calm is not automatically the goal, and arousal is not automatically the enemy. What you are after is a system that can move between them.

The older idea was simple: stress bad, relaxation good. It missed that the same slowing down which feels like peace when you are safe is shutdown…

Five minutesYour nervous systemBody basedQur’an 6:125

A stress response is built to finish. The rush comes up, you do something with it, and then it drains away and you are back to yourself.

The trouble is that the doing something rarely happens, because you cannot run or shout in the middle of a meeting. The aim is not to stop the surge.…

Five minutesYour nervous systemBody basedQur’an 94:2

Your stress system needs an all clear as much as it needs an alarm. What often breaks after trauma is the signal that says it is over.

Cortisol rises to get you moving, and a feedback loop is meant to notice you are safe and turn the tap off. When that loop is working badly, avoiding…

Five minutesYour nervous systemBody basedQur’an 106:4

A day has a shape. Energy up in the morning, a real dip in the early afternoon, a second lift in the evening, then down into sleep.

That early afternoon dip is normal and not a sign that you are lazy. Knowing the ordinary pattern gives you something to compare your own against,…

Five minutesYour nervous systemBody basedQur’an 6:96

Roughly four fifths of the traffic on the vagus nerve is heading up from your body to your brain. Your brain is largely reading a report from your body.

That is the strongest argument for working with the body rather than only with thoughts. If the report says danger, telling yourself a better story…

Five minutesYour nervous systemBody basedQur’an 32:9

A child who does not feel safe cannot filter the room. The pencil scratch, the scraping chair, the fan and the rustle of a coat all arrive at the same volume as the teacher.

So the attention problem is real, and it is not the same thing as not caring or not trying. A quieter corner, a seat away from the noisy fan, a…

Five minutesYour nervous systemBody basedQur’an 16:78

A child at the nursery door who charms you, then rages, then crumples is running through the whole repertoire in ninety seconds. Nothing has gone wrong yet.

The sequence is ordinary: try connection first, then protest, then collapse when neither works. What decides how the morning lands is what happens…

Five minutesYour nervous systemBody basedQur’an 20:46

Not all stillness is the same. One kind is braced and wide awake. The other has gone soft and far away.

In the braced kind there is high alertness and a lot of held tension: jaw set, hands tight, everything ready. In the collapsed kind the tone drops…

Five minutesYour nervous systemBody basedQur’an 6:125

The goal is not to have less energy. It is to have a brake you can feather rather than slam.

Your accelerator is not the problem. You need it for work, for lifting things, for standing up for somebody. What tends to be missing is the fine…

Five minutesYour nervous systemBody basedQur’an 6:96

There is a difference between not being upset anymore and actually being settled. The first is a rough tuning. The second is finer.

On a stringed instrument the big pegs get you near the note and the small tuners at the other end find the exact pitch, and the difference is…

Five minutesYour nervous systemBody basedQur’an 89:27