You know the feeling: it’s warm – maybe genuinely hot, maybe just that particular British summer mugginess that sits on you like a damp coat – and the idea of rolling out your mat and moving sounds actively unpleasant.
Your usual practice feels like too much. So you skip it…and then comes the low-level guilt about skipping it, which is its own kind of exhausting.
Here’s what I want you to know: your body is not being difficult. It’s being intelligent.
What heat actually does
When temperatures rise, your nervous system shifts; your body’s working harder to regulate its internal temperature, which means it has less capacity for everything else – including the kind of effort and focus that a more demanding physical practice requires. This isn’t a failure of willpower. It’s just physiology.
The practices that feel difficult in the heat often are more difficult in the heat; your body is telling you something true, so the question isn’t how to push through it. The question is what you can choose instead.
A different kind of practice
Yoga has always had seasons; not just in the calendar sense, but in the understanding that what we need shifts, and our practice can shift with it.
In the heat, that often means:
Prāṇāyāma (“breathwork”) – specifically cooling practices. Śītalī prāṇāyāma (cooling breath) and śītkārī prāṇāyāma (hissing breath) use the breath itself to bring the body’s temperature down. They’re subtle, they’re quiet, and they work – both physiologically and as a way of landing in your body when your nervous system is running warm.
Restorative floor sequences – slow, supported, minimal effort; not a “lazy” practice, but a deliberate one. When the body is already working hard just to exist in high temperatures, giving it full permission to rest is the practice. Gravity does most of the work…you just need to stay.
Yoga nidrā – perhaps the most underused tool in the whole of yoga. A guided practice of deep relaxation that takes you to the threshold between waking and sleep. It restores the nervous system without demanding anything from the body; in the summer, it’s quietly indispensable (as it is in winter, spring, and autumn too).
These practices are on YouTube – right now
I’ve been putting out a mini-series this month: Yoga for the Heat. Three videos, each built around one of the practices above. They’re free, they’re short enough to fit into a warm afternoon, and they were made specifically for the kind of days when your mat feels like the last place you want to be, even though you also really want to roll it out and practice.
Your practice doesn’t have to look the same in July as it does in January; remember: adapting isn’t giving up – it’s actually the whole point.
samdyllon.com 