What is it that you need?

What is your yoga practice for? This is a good question to ask yourself as you come to your mat to practice at home. This simple question, when considered quietly and with focus will lead you to understand and to give yourself exactly what you need from your yoga practice on any given day.

Sometimes, it will be right to push yourself beyond your previous boundaries, to test your courage, your strength and your flexibility, to attempt asana/breathing practices/meditations that you have previously found challenging. On other days, it will be more appropriate to move slowly and mindfully, or to sit quietly to meditate on something familiar, even to read something inspiring instead. The trick is in understanding your differing needs and over time you will learn how to respond to them appropriately.

Some people find it hard to motivate themselves to get to their mat at all, and once there the feeling that they don't really know what they are supposed to be doing and can't remember any of the poses leads them to give up easily. But some cat stretches, a standing forward bend, savasana, or some simple breathing practice (of the 'I am breathing in; I am breathing out' kind) is sufficient to lead you to your intended outcome.

Other people find it hard to believe that 10 minutes of gentle stretches constitutes a worthwhile yoga asana practice; that yoga should be 90 minutes of sweat and hard work, or nothing at all.

But I have come to my mat for 90 minutes of hard work and for 10 minutes of very gentle stretches and emerged feeling more whole, more happy and more centred from both.

Every yoga practice should draw you nearer to kindness, focus, gentleness, strength, serenity, peace and joy. It should always bring more ease to your body and mind. But how you get there will differ from day to day. Sometimes you will find your centre by working hard; sometimes you will find it by giving yourself gentleness. Remembering that no yoga practice is a waste of time, is a way to approach your mat with a kind attitude every time. With a kind and gentle attitude towards yourself, you simply can’t go wrong.

Sarah x

We are all People Pleasers

People pleasing is your attempt to control what people think of you. You want to make people like you and you want everbody to think good things about you.

Perhaps you think you have a special gift that can make others better.
Maybe you are investing a lot of time and energy doing things to prove your goodness and usefulness to the world.
Or is your secret fear that the world can do without you - if they don’t need you, then what is your value?

The truth is that you don’t need everbody to like you: you have plenty of rewarding and valuable relationships in your life.

The truth is that if you truly valued and admired yourself, you wouldn’t need all of that external validation.

The truth is that nobody can fix anybody else; healing is an inside job. You are special, but not because you are a saviour.

It's awkward isn't it, because most of us want to be liked by as many people as possible, or even by everyone. And so most of us are people pleasing a lot of the time.

But you want to be free and energised, right? Not trapped and exhausted. So you're going to have to find a new way of moving through the world at some point. And you know as well as I do that acceptance, not control-seeking, is the key to peace.

How long it takes you to get round to this is up to you. When you finally do, you will be astounded by how little anyone cares that you said no to something you usually say yes to. You will discover that the thought that they needed you was all in your head! If you are afraid that you are surplus to the world’s requirements, you will come to feel confident that the world still loves you even after you have stopped betraying yourself in the service of others.

Controlling is a trap: you will never succeed and you will run yourself ragged trying.

Acceptance is freedom: now you will learn how to roll with life’s waves, how to bounce back from difficult times, how to grow in empathy.

Controlling is exhausting; accepting is energising.

Beauty lies in our capacity to be around for each other, to respect other people’s choices, to have confidence in our own worthiness and to honour the life journeys of the people we know. They are doing it their way, you are doing it your way. Neither are better/best; both are valid/true.

Allow the world to embrace you without grasping for it. You will be surprised how generous it can be when you loosen your hold a little.

Sarah x

Lizard Brain

A word about anxiety.

There is a part of your brain that is very old. It’s known as the lizard brain, because it’s old enough to have been part of the brain before humans were humans, when we were still reptilian, but it’s really called the amygdala. It’s role is to detect fear and to fire up your fight/flight/freeze response so that you can escape that fear.

It’s a very useful part of your brain and it’s why you are reading this today: your ancestors survived and here you are.

The trouble with the amygdala is that it is not verbal. Let me explain: if you are feeling sad, you can talk to yourself to bring yourself comfort. If you are tired, you know how to soothe yourself and that you need an early night.

But you can’t talk to your lizard brain in this way, because it doesn’t have the capacity for language.

So when you are afraid, when anxiety feels like it is taking over your world, your way of life, when it has hijacked your sleeping patterns and your breath, when you feel that you have been overwhelmed by it. When these awful feelings come, talking to yourself doesn’t really work. You’re trying to apply your rational brain to a part of you that isn’t rational.

There is a more effective way and it is very simple. The way is to make your body feel safe and thereby calm the nervous system.

This happens through your breath (if you breathe deeply, your body receives signals that you are safe and the amygdala calms it’s stress reponse). It happens through feeling your body with techniques such as tapping, or yoga, where you bring yourself out of your thinking, spiralling brain and back into your body. It happens through doing exercise, which releases stress hormones and creates a calmer physical state. It happens through stimulating your vagus nerve, that part of your nervous system responsible for feelings of calm.

If life hasn’t felt safe to you, for whatever reason, then it is likely that you have forgotten how to inspire the side of your nervous system that makes you feel calm and at peace. But there are simple techniques at hand to help you.

Life is often challenging, seldom easy and full of things that throw us off. It is not possible to create a life in which nothing makes you afraid. You may have tried and you may have noticed that this has the effect of making your life very small as you seek to withdraw from anything that arouses that fearful state within you.

The trick here is to learn how to make your body a safe place in which to live. The aim is that you can feel the fears you have and rather than fight them, and face them from within a body that is calm, its breath undisturbed.

The Long Covid practice on my website (free) is a great place to start: the gentle rocking movements and attention to linking movement and breath create a soothing practice that calms your system. The Viloma 2 pranayama practice in the Yogi’s Library (also free) might help too. Breath without movement doesn’t work for everybody though - if you have experienced panic attacks linked to a feeling of not being able to breathe, then beginning with the more physical practices of yoga might feel like a safer place to start your journey into peace.

It’s a different way of thinking about your anxiety. Instead of hating it, fighting it, arguing with it and rejecting that part of yourself, you embrace yourself, learn how to make your body a safe, calm, strong place in which to live and allow those anxious feelings to be ok, to be a normal part of your life expereince right now, but not to highjack your entire system so that life feels sad and dangerous.

Sarah x