KayaYogini

I am laying on the sofa, looking out the window through the blinds. Taking in the shallow light, the greens, the slow energy of a Sunday. It’s so nice and still. 

Finding stillness during the day has become so important to me in the last months. It is a way of centering, filling up on new energy, and calming down. Really it’s about regulating the nervous system. Regulation is not the same as calming. Regulation is about being able to calm down after stress. Think about your stress levels as waves. You’re supposed to be able to ride the wave, handling the buzzing of the day, your work, your studies, stressful exams, whatever is present in your life. There is such a thing as positive stress. Positive stress makes you alert and helps you perform better. It helps you concentrate and get things done. You are not supposed to be relaxed all the time. But you’re neither supposed to stay at this level of stress. Your nervous system should be able to calm down. This is regulation. Healthy levels of stress and calm in waves. 

One thing that can happen when we are highly stressed, is that we become less present in our bodies. Some people are completely dissociated from their bodies and can’t feel their body at all. However, nearly everyone can benefit from becoming more in touch with their bodies. For some types of stress, what you need is not breathing techniques or meditation. For some people, meditation can actually make stress worse! A safe way to calm down, is to focus more on grounding and coming back to the physical aspect of yourself. Here are some tips that will help you feel more calm, more in touch with yourself and safer in your body. 

1. Just stop wherever you are and notice what you can sense within yourself. Feel the clothes on your skin, the soles of your feet on the ground, your back against the chair, whatever you can feel in your body. 

2.Notice what’s around you, sense your surroundings, watch, listen, feel, smell. 

3.Place your right hand on the ribcage beneath your left upper arm (at the side of your heart). Place the left hand on the right upper arm. Stay here for at least a minute. This is an old technique which calms the vagus nerve. 

4.Place your hands on your heart. Stay here for at least a minute. This helps to connect deeper with yourself. 

5.Notice where in your body you are breathing. When we are stressed out, we expand our ribcage and lift our shoulders, we lift the rib cage away from the pelvis. This stretches the belly and it becomes harder to breath down into the belly. Notice right now if you are doing this. If so, let go of this tension by expanding and lifting as much as you can, and then release. It should become easier and more automatic to breathe in your belly. 

6.Now, observe your breath a little. Calm your nervous system by counting your breath, breathing in for 2 counts, hold for 4 counts, exhale for 8 counts and hold for 2 counts. Repeat this some few times. There are a ton of other breathing techniques you can do, for simplicity, I’ll leave you with this single one. Feel free to do your own research if you want to learn more about this!

7.Do this mini-practice at least once a day. Preferably more often. 

This practice includes a collection of techniques that I have learned from many different teachers and some that I have discovered in my own practice. It helps to calm even the most distracted people. I love this practice because it doesn’t require much focus or skill. You don’t need to learn to meditate to get the benefit from it. I also love it because it focuses more on the body and less on the mind. I’ve incorporated this into my own yoga practice as a tune-in before I start to move my body. It works wonders I promise. 

Why is it important to be in our bodies? It makes you more steady, more grounded and more confident and in turn more calm. Think about your body as earth and your mind as air. Which one is more rapid? Which one is more stable? Which one is more reliable? A lot of what we do is stimulating the mind, reading, writing, checking our phones, watching the news, talking, thinking, making decisions. It can become too much. When we are so much in our minds, it can be hard to turn the thinking-wheel off. Learning to sense more makes life so much more pleasurable. Tasting the food, watching the leaves blow in the wind, listening to the birds, feeling the soft pillow supporting your back. Really experiencing life and choosing to enjoy it. It’s as simple as that. 

If you are wondering what I’ve been doing all this time that I’ve been away from blogging, Instagram and Youtube, this is part of it. Going through some stressful times and learning how to handle it. I hope this simple process will help you too. Thank  you for reading! Until next time ❤