Give your mind a break with active relaxation

We have so many layers to us. Yet we focus usually just on shaping our lives with our mind. And we have a limited view of mind: we see mind as this overall word for everything that happens to us. But our mind is based on our past, and isn’t always right!

Our layers of bodies and experiences get kindly uncovered when you engage in any kind of yoga, meditation, or mindfulness practice. Some of the things you’ve told yourself, felt, or wanted are revealed to you. It sounds challenging, and it is hard at times. But it’s also gloriously easy because there’s a relief you feel when you realise that you don’t need to cover up anymore—that you don’t need to wait another decade to feel more content in life. You’re already the real you; you’ve just gotten a bit cluttered along the way.

At some point in any yoga pose, there’s a moment when you realise you’re thinking. It’s like you get the opportunity to peek at the ‘why.’ This awareness allows you to let go of everything. You stop searching for control, and you can breathe deeper and sink further into the pose. Your breath can guide this process too—relax the body to relax the mind. You start using your intelligence instead of just your intellect. It’s like going on holiday and spending a day preparing, a day travelling, and then you arrive at the edge of the lake and you make a massive sigh out. You’ve arrived in the moment.

In a yoga pose, you may realise you’ve been brooding over something that happened during the day that hurt, or something that suddenly appears extremely urgent on your unchecked to-do list. Perhaps images of past relationships will show up. It’s all good. Your clever mind is trying to support you; it’s just a bit of an overachiever!

It’s like your mind is going through a deep-soak cycle instead of a rinse cycle.

Alternating between feeling sensations in the body, anxious thoughts, inspiring ideas, or sounds and smells is very normal. In fact, if you can relax with that and let those things just pass by, rather than telling yourself you shouldn’t be feeling or thinking that, then you move to another state.

Your intellect’s (mind) sole job is to keep you safe. Through your limbic system, it looks for signals to determine if all is well. If it perceives a threat, it will act accordingly. It will scream for your attention. But there is so much more going on than this all-compassing view of mind. Yoga gives you change to focus on your other lowers: how breath affects your energy; giving space for wisdom and intuition to emerge; your ability to connect with nature and therefore outside yourself; and resting back into silence and stillness. This deep resting can be hard at first because we usually don’t have experience of doing no-thing. We often take pride in how busy we are because we feel value that way. We have to trust that this is the space of silence and stillness that will create our next moment. The present carries the future.

You may have heard yoga being called a practice. It’s called that for a reason: it takes time and evolves. Years ago, a meditation teacher told me that the most painful thing is to NOT be on your path. The only way to stay on your path is to keep walking on it.

The pathway to calm is to let your thoughts just hang out where they are.

By doing this, you will allow space to drop into your body and just rest. Of course, if you experience pain, you need to adjust. Stop striving. If you’re familiar with this pain or tension comes from, you can breathe into it and let it be there until it changes or adjust with kindness. A sweet stretch in the body is good; pain is not.

If you experience PTSD or past trauma, then you may need different kinds of support around you. Yoga is excellent to support the healing in these conditions, but you need to feel safe enough to let go. I can work alongside other health practitioners who support you and bring a yoga perspective and practice to your healing. Please reach out.

Back to that moment in a pose where you realise you’re still totally in your head: You can use the in-breath to gather this tension (physical and mental) and then use the out-breath to release whatever you observe or are holding on to. Feel tension and distraction leave through your nostrils with your breath. Eventually, you’ll learn to instantly soften and the shape you’re in starts to feel a bit like falling in love. Effortless. Gentle. .

If not, you can fake it: make your out-breath longer than your in-breath. Visualise muscles and thoughts softening or disappearing. You’ll have your unique way of doing this. Trust.

Send signals to your body and mind that it is okay to let go.

I do hatha or vinyasa flow yoga with my lovely partner most mornings. I can feel when he lets his mind and body go in a pose—it’s about halfway through. Up until then, there’s a bit of huffing and puffing, agitation, striving and commentary. And I know he sneaks in some tummy crunches at the end when we are meant to be totally letting go! Even though I’ve been doing yoga and meditation on and off for three decades, I still find myself going back to the beginning sometimes. Letting go in the moment is the hardest thing to do but it is the single most beneficial thing we can do for our physical and mental health. The changes are slow, but there’s no going back once you’ve made a shift.

Try a class with me or find a yoga class in your neighbourhood. Starting with restorative yoga or yoga nidra is a gentle way to begin. Forget the word “yoga” if it you think you can’t do yoga. Yoga just means means union of mind and body - being in another state. Just think about active relaxation, bringing ease. We are all messy and challenged and have to start somewhere. We are all also filled with beautiful layers just waiting to catch a breath and deeply rest.