Your quiet calm or your true self, a place we tend to find through our yoga practice and through meditation, but also a place we go to when we find our version of Yoga off the Mat.
I always starting my yoga classes with a few minutes of stillness, a few minutes to connect, shedding whatever it is we don’t need to bring into our practice and tapping into our inner stillness. By doing this we help reduce our cortisol levels, lower our heart rate and slow our breathing down, but we also provide ourselves with a reminder of the fact that place of calm is always there, even at those times it seems impossible to find.
Calming breath work, such as the Diaphragmatic Breathing I described in my last blog post, will help invite a deeper sense of calm into your mind to help carry you to this place, but there’s so many other ways we can find it too, and by practicing this enough we can help form a new habit of going to our default setting throughout the day.
Some of my go to journeys to this place are:
Taking just 1-5 minutes to yourself, to close your eyes and focus on your breath, becoming aware of where it’s travelling to and how it feels in your body at that moment.
Knowing we can always slow our breath down if it’s feeling a little fast, by taking slow deep breaths down into the diaphragm.
Moving through a body scan, closing your eyes, drawing your focus inward and acknowledging all the different sensations in your body.
Walking in nature, maybe even leaving your phone at home and just enjoying the present moment, noticing everything that’s going on around you.
Lighting some candles and reading with a tea/coffee/hot chocolate (perhaps even in bed - my favourite way to start the day)
Mindfully eating a delicious and healthy meal - pausing to notice all the different textures and flavours.
Being around good friends and family, filling yourself up with love and gratitude for all the amazing people you have in your life.
Having a digital detox - which is something I find myself doing regularly, social media can definitely be a bit of trigger of my anxiety, so when I feel myself becoming a little unsettled, I’ll log off my Instagram for a few days and sometimes turn my WhatsApp notifications off, just to give myself a bit of time to recalibrate.