There’s a feeling I always get at the start of a new leave year: it arrives quietly, usually sometime in the first week of April. The entitlement ticks back up, and the calendar, for one brief and beautiful moment, looks open.
You could take a Tuesday off just because. You could book a long weekend for no reason at all. The maths you’ve been doing since the end of last year – does this fit around that, can I save enough for Christmas, is this actually worth it – stops, just for a second.
It doesn’t last. Within days the diary fills again, the requests come in, the commitments stack – the spaciousness closes as quickly as it opened.
But I keep thinking about that moment. That exhale.
I think it’s the body recognising what it needs. Not a specific day off, not a destination – just permission. The permission to stop carrying everything for a while.
That’s been the thread running through everything I’ve shared this April, and in this post I want to bring it all together – the videos, the ideas, the practices – and point you towards what comes next.
Your body keeps the score of your working day
This has been April’s theme at Rest & Rise, and it’s not a metaphor, it’s physiology.
Every hour at a desk, every meeting that runs long, every lunch eaten while scrolling, every evening that was meant to be yours but somehow wasn’t, the body stores all of it. In the jaw, the hips, the shoulders that creep up towards the ears, the breath that never quite drops all the way down.
The body isn’t dramatic about it. It doesn’t complain loudly. It just quietly accumulates, and then one day you realise you’ve been tense for so long that tenseness has started to feel like normal.
A weekend helps. Sleep helps. But neither reaches the deeper layers, and most of us know that, even if we don’t have the words for it. You can sleep eight hours and still wake up tired. You can have a restful Sunday and still feel braced on Monday morning before anything has even happened.
This is what April’s content has been circling, not to alarm you, but to name it – because the thing that’s named can be addressed.
The practices, if you missed them
Each week this month I’ve shared something short, something practical, something you can do inside your working dayrather than despite it. Here they are in one place.
Breathe. Let Go.
We started at the very beginning: the breath.
Prāṇāyāma – “breathwork” – is one of the eight limbs of yoga, and it’s one of the most immediately powerful tools we have. Not because it’s complicated, but because the breath is always available. It’s with you in the meeting, at the desk, on the commute home.
This practice is short and requires nothing from you except a few minutes and a willingness to pause. If you’ve never done any prāṇāyāma before, this is the place to start, if you have, you’ll recognise immediately why it matters.
Your Hands Work Hard.
We talk a lot about shoulders and backs, but the hands are one of the most overlooked parts of the working body.
Typing, scrolling, holding a phone, writing, gripping a steering wheel, holding small hands, making food – the hands are in almost constant use, and almost never get any dedicated attention. This practice gives them some. It’s gentle, it’s grounding, and it’s the kind of thing that makes you wonder why you’ve never thought to do it before.
Good for a mid-afternoon break, or whenever you notice your hands feeling tight or tired.
Close the Day.
This one matters.
The transition between work and the rest of your day is one that most of us don’t actually make that often any longer. We close the laptop and open the phone. We move from one screen to another and the body doesn’t know the working day has ended because nothing has told it.
This practice is a ritual for that transition – a way of consciously closing one chapter before another begins. It’s not long, but it changes the quality of your evening if you do it consistently, and that changes the quality of your sleep, and that changes the quality of the next day.
I’d encourage you to try this one for a week and see what you notice.
Give Your Back Some Love.
We finished where most people feel the working day most acutely: the back.
This practice is longer and more movement-based than the others – a proper chance to undo some of what the week accumulates. You might want a mat for this one, though you don’t have to be particularly flexible or experienced, just bring your body and go gently.
If you’ve been sitting more than you’d like this month, this is the one to come back to.
Watch: Give Your Back Some Love.
The doorway and the destination
I want to be honest about something:
those four practices are real, they help. and I made them because I wanted you to have something you could actually use – not aspirational content about how you should be taking care of yourself, or videos “showing off” my āsana practice and perhaps making you feel bad about your practice, but something you could press play on right now.
But they’re the doorway, not the destination.
The deeper rest – the kind that actually shifts something, the kind that reaches the layers the working week has been quietly filling up – happens when we give ourselves longer. When we lie down and we stay there. When we stop negotiating with the body and just listen to it.
In yoga, we have a name for this: pratyāhāra – the withdrawal of the senses, the turning inward. It’s the fifth of the eight limbs, and it’s the bridge between the outer practices (movement, breath, posture) and the inner ones (concentration, meditation, stillness). It’s the moment when you stop doing and start being.
Most of us live our entire lives on the outer side of that bridge and wonder why we’re still exhausted.
What yoga nidrā actually is
Yoga nidrā – yogic sleep – is a guided practice of systematic relaxation that takes you right to the threshold of that bridge and holds you there.
You lie down. You’re guided through the body, layer by layer – physical sensation, breath, emotion, awareness. You move through states of consciousness that sit somewhere between waking and sleeping, and in that liminal space, the nervous system does something it rarely gets to do: it fully, genuinely lets go.
It isn’t a nap, it isn’t guided meditation in the sitting-still-“trying-not-to-think” sense, it’s more like giving the body permission to process everything it’s been holding – and research suggests that even a relatively short practice can produce the kind of restoration that usually takes hours of deep sleep to achieve.
That feeling you get at the start of a new leave year, when the calendar looks empty and you exhale – yoga nidrā is the practice that actually delivers what that feeling is promising: not the idea of rest; rest itself.
Come and actually rest
On Sunday May 10th, I’m holding my next Strong Enough to Rest yoga nidrā event at The Senhouse Centre, Whitehaven.
It’s 75 minutes, and you lie down for most of it. There will be herbal teas, homemade egg- and dairy-free snacks, and a small, warm group of people who came because they needed it too.
It costs £20. No yoga experience needed, no flexibility required, you don’t need to be calm or sorted or ready – you just need to show up. Want to come but things are getting tight? My Yoga for All Fund has you covered.
Book your place at Strong Enough to Rest
If you’ve been following along this month, and any part of it has landed – if you’ve caught yourself nodding at a post, or pressed play on one of the videos because something in the title felt familiar – this is the next step.
Not ready for an event yet?
That’s completely fine, start here instead:
I made a free resource called Which Practice for What – three practices matched to three specific states: when you need to ground, when you need to calm down, and when you need to genuinely rest. It’s a gentle introduction to what a fuller practice can feel like, and it’s yours to keep.
Get Which Practice for What, free
The new leave year always feels like freedom at the start: for a moment, everything is possible and nothing is booked and the body recognises the space before the diary does.
That feeling is telling you something true.
April has been about naming what the working year does to the body, May is about giving it something back.
I hope I’ll see you on the mat.
samdyllon.com 