Author: Sam Dyllon

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There’s something I’ve caught myself alluding to more than once this month, usually to someone lying very still on a mat while their brain runs a to-do list underneath them: this isn’t rest – it’s just your body being horizontal while your nervous system stays on duty.

August, as it turned out, became an accidental month-long study in exactly that distinction. I didn’t set out to write a month of content about rest specifically, I’d planned a fairly normal spread across breath, flexibility, meditation, the usual; but nearly everything I taught, filmed, or talked through with someone after a class or generally about yoga kept circling back to the same underlying question: what is your body actually being asked to do right now, and is it being asked kindly?

It’s a question I come back to a lot in my own practice, too, if I’m honest. I don’t think I fully believed, for a long time, that rest was something I was allowed without having first proven I deserved it, and I suspect a fair few of you reading this know that particular internal negotiation well.

Rest isn’t something you earn

Somewhere along the way, rest was recast as a reward – something you’re allowed once you’ve done enough, ticked enough off, proven yourself tired enough to deserve it. Your nervous system doesn’t actually work on that logic; it doesn’t check your to-do list before deciding whether you’re allowed to downshift – rest is a physiological state, not a prize.

And guilt-free rest tends to work faster than the negotiated kind, simply because your body isn’t spending half of it arguing with you about whether it’s earned or what you “should” be doing.

Physiologically, what we’re calling “rest” here is your parasympathetic nervous system taking the lead – the part responsible for digestion, repair, slower heart rate, the whole “rest and digest” side of things, as opposed to the sympathetic “fight or flight” mode that a demanding day tends to keep active. That handover doesn’t happen instantly, and it doesn’t happen well if part of you is still keeping score of what you haven’t finished. The negotiating itself – have I done enough to deserve this – keeps a foot in the sympathetic door, which is precisely why rest-with-guilt-attached so often doesn’t feel restful at all, even when you’ve technically stopped moving (or even slept).

If you want to test this yourself: next time you sit or lie down to rest, notice whether there’s a small voice auditing whether you’ve earned it. You don’t need to argue with it; just noticing it’s there tends to loosen its grip a little.

“Just relax” was never useful advice

If you’ve ever been told to “just relax” and found your jaw got tighter, not looser; and your shoulders somehow raise even higher than they were – that’s not you failing at relaxing; it’s your nervous system doing precisely what it’s built to do when it doesn’t feel safe enough to let go. Telling it to hurry up rarely helps, mostly because “just relax” is an instruction aimed at your conscious mind, and the part deciding whether you’re safe enough to soften isn’t run by your consciousness at all.

What does help, more often than people expect, is something as small as a physiological sigh – where we inhale normally, then add another inhale to “fill up” the lungs, then take a long exhale through the mouth; “long” meaning simply longer than your initial inhale. It’s not a trick or a mindset shift: your exhale is directly linked to your vagus nerve, which is one of the main lines of communication telling your body it’s safe to stand down. A longer exhale is, in a very literal sense, a signal your body can act on, in a way that “relax” – spoken as a word, from the outside – simply isn’t.

Try it next time you notice your jaw tightening rather than the instruction to relax on its own; if you feel little different after one, try two more. It’s a small thing, but it’s also one of the few nervous-system tools with genuinely immediate, felt effects.

Flexibility and breath, the same conversation

A few pieces of this month’s work sat closer to the body than the nervous system directly: forward folds that finally hinge from the hip instead of the lower back; shoulders that stop creeping towards your ears the moment your hips get proper support. None of it was really separate from the rest theme, a body that’s braced, moving from the wrong place, or holding its breath at a desk without noticing, is a body that hasn’t quite been given permission to soften yet either.

It’s worth saying plainly: “I’m just not a flexible person” is rarely the full picture. Your range of motion isn’t fixed the way your height is – it’s a combination of technique, how much your nervous system trusts a particular position enough to let you go further into it, as well as practice – or how often you do it (and do it well). That’s why forcing a stretch tends to backfire; you’re arguing with a protective mechanism rather than working with it. Then consistency and small technical corrections – height under the hips in a seated position, a soft-knee hinge from the hip crease rather than the lower back – tend to move things further than sheer effort ever does.

The desk-breath-holding point is smaller but connects the same way: a body that’s braced at a desk without noticing is often the same body that then struggles to fold or soften later in the day. They’re not unrelated habits.

The part of meditation nobody warns you about

If you’ve sat down to meditate and immediately started planning your shopping list – that’s not a failure of the practice; it’s just what a mind does. The actual skill isn’t achieving a blank, quiet head on command; it’s noticing you’ve drifted, and coming back, as many times as it takes. The coming-back is the practice, not evidence it isn’t working.

I still find this one genuinely difficult to remember in the moment, even after years of both practicing as well as teaching it to other people. There’s something quietly humbling about sitting down with the specific intention of being still, and finding your mind immediately less interested in stillness than in what you’re having for dinner. I’ve come to think the drifting isn’t really the obstacle to the practice – the judgement about the drifting is: a mind that wanders and returns, without commentary, is doing exactly what meditation asks of it; but a mind that wanders and then spends the next two minutes criticising itself for wandering has left the practice entirely.

If it helps: count the returns rather than resenting them. Ten returns in five minutes isn’t ten failures – it’s ten repetitions of the skill you’re actually there to build.

Where this all lands

None of this is about trying harder; if anything, it’s the opposite – most of what showed up this month pointed towards doing less, more precisely: a longer exhale instead of a harder effort to calm down, a body that’s finally supported rather than pushed, five minutes of properly withdrawing your attention instead of forcing focus, resting without first negotiating whether you’ve earned it.

If there’s a single thread running under all of it, it’s this: your nervous system generally isn’t looking for more instruction. It’s looking for evidence – the longer exhale, a moment of actual stillness, a stretch that isn’t a fight – that it’s safe enough to stop bracing. Everything this month has really been different ways of offering that evidence, rather than different ways of trying harder.

If any of this sounds somewhat familiar, there are a few ways in. Rest & Rise yoga classes run every Thursday, 7–8:15pm, at Rosehill Theatre in Whitehaven – £12 drop-in, or £40 for a block of four if you’re coming back. It’s a small room on purpose; twelve people so it never turns into something to perform in. If group classes aren’t quite what you need right now, 1:1 sessions are built entirely around whatever you’re working with, from twenty to 90 minutes, with a personal pace & intention.

Either way – no earning required first.

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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.

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There’s a version of rest that most of us are very familiar with: it comes at the end of a long day, or a long week, when you’ve finally done enough – or simply given up trying. You lie down, you scroll, or you stare at the ceiling, or you half-watch something you’ve already seen on the big screen while you have a little screen in your hand, too. And somewhere in the background, a low-level hum: I should be doing something; I’ll feel better when this is done; I’ll rest properly once I’ve got on top of things.

That hum – that’s what I want to talk about today.

Because that’s not rest, that’s suspension; and most of us have been living in suspension for so long that we’ve forgotten there’s even a difference.

The thing nobody told us

We weren’t, as a culture, taught how to rest. We were shamed for sitting down – called “lazy”, maybe even “ungrateful”, as we were taught only how to be productive. We were taught the goal of rest was to be productive again, soon. We were taught that rest is what you earn, not what you need – something you get to do in proportion, once all the work is done, the inbox is empty, the house is tidy, the list is finished, and nobody needs us.

The list is never finished; there’s always a new email; and somebody always wants us to do something so they don’t have to.

And so most of us move through our lives in a state of low-grade depletion, permanently slightly behind, taking breaks that don’t actually restore us and wondering why we’re still tired (or exhausted, if we’re honest).

This isn’t a personal failing, it’s not a discipline problem, or a motivation problem, or even a matter of simply needing to prioritise better. It’s a nervous system problem – and it needs a different solution than just “finding the time”.

What the nervous system actually needs

Your nervous system has two main modes: activation and rest. You’ve probably heard them described as fight-or-flight and rest-and-digest. In the yoga tradition, these map loosely onto the concept of prāṇa – life force or energy – and how it flows through the body.

When we’re in activation mode, everything is oriented toward response: heart rate up; breath shallow; attention narrowed. The body is doing exactly what it’s designed to do in the face of a threat.

The problem is that modern life is relentlessly activating with notifications, deadlines, noise, the news, the inbox, the other inbox, the mental load of simply being a person right now – all of which reads, to the nervous system, as something to respond to. And our nervous systems don’t know a lion from yet another sales email from that company. It just knows: something requires your attention.

So we stay activated; we learn to function from within that activation and we stop noticing how tightly wound we are because that becomes our baseline.

Rest, in this context, isn’t laziness, it’s biology. Your nervous system needs regular opportunities to downregulate that is to shift out of response mode and into genuine recovery. Without that, we stay dysregulated. Sleep becomes less restorative; small things feel disproportionately hard; the capacity to be present, to be creative, to be kind – it all erodes.

You’re not failing at life – your nervous system is simply exhausted and it doesn’t know how to stop.

Why “just relax” doesn’t work

Here’s the thing about relaxation: it is a skill.

Like any skill, it can be learned, practised, and improved; and like any skill, you can’t just will yourself into competence without the right conditions and a bit of guidance.

“Just relax” is not an instruction, it’s an aspiration with no method attached.

When someone who is chronically activated tries to relax – really and actually relax – they often find that they can’t. Their body lies down but it’s almost as if their brain stays standing. Their eyes close, but the thoughts speed up; rest then feels, not like relief, but like confrontation – with everything they haven’t done, everything they’re worried about, everything they’ve been too busy to feel bubbling up to the surface.

This isn’t a sign that something is wrong with you; but it is a sign that your nervous system has been so consistently in activation mode that slowing down is unfamiliar; perhaps even uncomfortable, and your body doesn’t quite trust it.

Which is exactly why it needs to be practised, not just attempted.

Where yoga comes in – and I don’t mean the stretching part

Yoga, in its fullest form, is an eight-limbed system. Āsana – the physical postures – is the third limb. It gets considerable airtime on social media and rather less in Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras, where it occupies roughly three verses.

The other seven limbs are equally real and, for a lot of people, considerably more transformative.

Prāṇāyāma – the fourth limb – (often called “breathwork” in the west) is the deliberate regulation of breath, which in turn regulates the nervous system, the mind, and the flow of energy through the body. This is not breathing exercises in the sense of inhale for four, hold for four, exhale for four (though that’s a perfectly good place to start); this is a sophisticated system for working with the breath as a bridge between the conscious and unconscious, the voluntary and the involuntary, the mind and the body.

Pratyāhāra – the fifth limb – is the withdrawal of the senses, or turning our attention inward. In a world of infinite scroll and constant stimulation, this might be the most radical act available to us: it asks nothing more than to stop taking input for a moment; just be where you are, without receiving anything.

These practices, along with the ethical foundations of the first two limbs (yama and niyama) and the deeper states of concentration and meditation that follow, are the parts of yoga that most profoundly affect the nervous system. Not because they’re mystical – though they can feel that way – but because they work.

The breath is the most direct voluntary pathway into the autonomic nervous system. The body, held in stillness, sends safety signals to the brain; and the mind, given a focal point, stops generating threat responses.

Yoga is, among other things, a very old technology for nervous system regulation.

Yoga nidrā: rest with a method

Of all the practices in the yoga tradition, yoga nidrā is the one I return to most often – in my own practice, and in the work I do with others.

Yoga nidrā translates, roughly, as “yogic sleep”. It’s a guided practice that systematically brings the body into a state of deep rest while the mind remains gently aware. The practitioner lies down while a teacher guides them through some or all of: a rotation of awareness; pairs of opposites; visualisation; and an extended state of restful presence. The body enters a state that research suggests resembles the hypnagogic state between waking and sleep – deeply restorative, deeply receptive.

People often describe coming out of a yoga nidrā session feeling as though they’ve slept for hours; some people do fall asleep, and that’s fine – the practice works either way. The point is not to stay awake and concentrate, but to give your nervous system a genuine, structured opportunity to let go.

This is rest with a method, not an aspiration or a vague instruction to calm down; a practice with a clear beginning, a clear structure, and a clear end – and the means to actually get there.

It’s also, crucially, something you can learn. The more regularly you practise yoga nidrā, the more readily your nervous system learns to access that state – the downregulation becomes more familiar, more available, and – eventually – more automatic.

You’re not just resting; you’re teaching your body that rest is safe.

The permission you were never given

In case it’s not yet clear from what I’ve been saying: you do not have to earn rest.

Not today, not this week, not once the project is finished, or the children are older, or things calm down a bit. You don’t have to be in crisis to deserve support; and you don’t have to have exhausted every other option before you allow yourself to stop.

Rest isn’t a reward; it is a necessity. And the cultural story that tells us otherwise – that productivity is virtue, that busyness signals worth, that stopping is self-indulgent – does genuine harm to genuine people.

You’re allowed to stop, you’re allowed to be still; you’re allowed to take an hour, or an afternoon, or a whole weekend, and fill it with nothing more purposeful than recovery.

And if you’ve been on the go for so long that you don’t quite know how to do that – if the stopping feels uncomfortable, or guilty, or unfamiliar – then that’s exactly what the practice of yoga nidrā is for.

You don’t have to figure it out alone; you just have to be willing to try something different.

Where to start

If any of this has resonated and you’re not sure where to begin, here are a few places:

Viparīta karaṇī (legs-up-the-wall) is one of the simplest and most effective practices I know. Lie on your back, legs resting up against a wall, hips as close to the wall as is comfortable; stay for five to fifteen minutes, or more. Let your breath slow and your legs get heavy. It requires nothing – no equipment, no experience, no flexibility – and it genuinely works.

Sama vṛtti (equal ratio or “box” breathing) is a prāṇāyāma practice that centres and calms the nervous system. Even two minutes can shift something. I have a guide on my YouTube channel if you’d like to try it.

Yoga nidrā is available to try for free on my Insight Timer profile – or if you’d like a guided, supported experience with a small group, my monthly Strong Enough to Rest sessions are exactly that. The next one is Sunday July 5th at 2:30pm in Whitehaven, Cumbria.

And if you’d like something more tailored – a practice built around what you actually need, with space to explore what’s going on for you and how yoga can genuinely help – my 1:1 work is a good place to start. You don’t need to know what you’re looking for, that’s what the first conversation is for.

Rest isn’t the absence of doing. It’s the presence of being.

And you’ve always been allowed to be here.

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Rest & Rise is a yoga and wellness brand based in West Cumbria. Sam teaches across all eight limbs of yoga with a focus on nervous system regulation and accessibility. Find out more at the link in bio, or explore free content on YouTube.

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There’s a particular kind of post that does very well on “yoga Instagram”, pretty much all the time. You’ll recognise it, I’m sure: “How to finally get your caturaṅga.”, or “My five-step handstand programme.”, or “Why you can’t do lotus (or any other āsana) yet – and how to fix it.”

I want to be clear that I’m not here to criticise anyone making that content; but I’ve been sitting for a long time with something that bothers me about the collective message it sends, and I think it’s worth saying out loud.

The implicit story underneath all of it – the “yet,” the “finally,” the “fix” – is that caturaṅga, handstands, or padmāsana are where yoga goes. That they’re the point, the destination, the prize, and the only reason you’re getting on your mat. That if you can’t do them, you’re only on a journey toward being able to, and that nothing else matters.

And I don’t think that’s yoga…I think that’s gymnastics with a Sáṃskṛta label on it.

What the texts actually say

The Yoga Sūtra of Patañjali are one of the oldest and most foundational texts on yoga philosophy. They’re not the only text, and yoga isn’t a monolithic tradition – but they’re a reasonable place to look when we want to understand what āsana was originally for.

Patañjali’s definition of āsana is famously brief: sthira sukham āsanam – steady, comfortable seat. That’s it; not a particular shape; not a level of difficulty. Just a quality: steadiness, ease.

The purpose of that steady, comfortable seat, in the context of the Sūtras, is to prepare the body to be still — so that the deeper work of the practice can happen without physical distraction. Āsana was always a preparation. A means, not an end.

That reframing matters, because it changes everything about how you relate to your body on the mat. The question stops being “can I do this shape?” and becomes “can I find steadiness and ease here?”

And those are genuinely different questions with genuinely different answers.

The eight limbs – and where āsana actually sits

Here’s something that surprises a lot of people when they first hear it: in the traditional eight-limb framework of yoga, āsana is the third limb.

The first two limbs – the yama and niyama – come before it. The yama are ethical principles for how we relate to the world around us: ahiṃsā (non-harming), satya (truthfulness), asteya (non-stealing), brahmacārya (wise use of energy), aparigraha (non-grasping). The niyamas are personal observances for how we relate to ourselves: śauca (cleanliness), santoṣa (contentment), tapas (discipline or heat), svādhyāya (self-study), and īśvara praṇidhāna (surrender to something larger than the self).

Only then do we arrive at āsana. After ethics, after self-inquiry, after learning how to be in relationship with the world and with yourself.

After āsana comes prāṇāyāma – breath practices. Then pratyāhāra, the withdrawal of the senses – the practice of deliberately stepping back from the constant noise and stimulation of the world. Then dhāraṇā, concentration. Followed by dhyāna, meditation. And finally, samādhi – a state of integration, absorption, the dissolution of the ordinary sense of separation between self and experience.

That’s the full picture. And caturaṅga doesn’t appear anywhere in it.

I’m not saying this to be pedantic about the tradition. I’m saying it because understanding this framework changes the relationship people have with their practice in ways that matter – practically, daily, in the body.

The “not yet” problem

When someone tells me they’re not flexible enough for yoga, or that they tried it once but weren’t good at it, or that they’d love to start but they can’t sit cross-legged, I hear something specific underneath those words.

I hear: I went looking for yoga and what I found told me my body was the problem.

The “not yet” framing is so embedded in the way yoga gets presented – particularly online – that most people absorb it without realising. You’re not flexible enough yet. You can’t do caturaṅga yet. Your hips aren’t open enough for lotus yet. Every “yet” implies a “standard” you’re currently “failing” to meet.

And for people who already carry a complicated relationship with their bodies – which, in my experience teaching, is most of us – that framing lands in a particular place. It reinforces the very thing that makes rest and regulation difficult to access in the first place: the sense that you need to be different than you are before you can begin.

I want to say something clearly, and I want you to take a moment with it: there is no prerequisite for yoga. There is no gate. The practice is available to your body, right now, exactly as it is – not as a modification, not as a beginner’s version, not as something you’ll grow into. As yoga. As your practice.

What yoga actually gives you

I’ve been teaching for several years now, and the thing that still gets me – the thing I don’t think I’ll ever stop finding significant – is the shift that happens when someone realises the practice isn’t asking them to perform.

Not for me, not for the room, and not for themselves.

When that realisation lands, something changes in the body. A quality of permission as people begin to breathe differently, and stop bracing.

And what the practice gives them after that has almost nothing to do with flexibility.

It gives them a regulated nervous system – not permanently, not magically, but practice-by-practice, their system learns that it’s safe to settle. For people who are sensitive, who run overstimulated, who find it genuinely hard to switch off: that learning is not a small thing.

It gives them a different relationship with discomfort. Not toughness but discernment – the ability to notice sensation, to stay with it long enough to understand it, to distinguish between the discomfort that’s useful information and the sensation that’s a signal to stop. That skill lives in the body long after the mat is rolled up.

It gives them a breath they can actually use. Prāṇāyāma – breath practices – is the fourth limb of yoga, and it’s one of the most practically useful things I teach. The breath is the one part of the autonomic nervous system that we can consciously influence, which makes it a remarkably direct route from the thinking mind into the body’s stress response. When you have a breath practice, you have something to reach for at 2am, in the difficult meeting, in the waiting room. It’s always there, and it costs nothing.

And – perhaps most significantly – yoga gives people a relationship with their own bodies that isn’t organised around what those bodies can do. That shift does take time (it took me a long time), but I think it might be the most important thing the practice has to offer.

A word about what I mean by “practice”

I want to be careful here, because I don’t mean any of this as an argument against physical challenge, or against working toward something in the body, or against the āsana practice being genuinely demanding and sometimes very hard.

I have a mat-based practise. I teach āsana. I find it meaningful, and I find it difficult, and I find it genuinely joyful. None of that is in question.

What I’m pushing back on is the narrowing – the reduction of yoga to its third limb, and the reduction of that limb to its most visually impressive expressions. Caturaṅga is one posture in a vast tradition. A handstand is a party trick with good branding. Padmāsana is a seated position that many bodies will never access – comfortably or otherwise – and the classical texts would not consider that a problem.

The practice is wide. Wider than any single class format, wider than the postures, wider than the mat. It includes how you speak to yourself. It includes how you rest. It includes the quality of attention you bring to your own life.

That’s not a consolation prize for people who can’t do the impressive things. That is the thing.

If this is new information

If you’ve been reading this and thinking nobody ever told me this – I want you to know that response is extremely common, and it’s not your fault.

Yoga at it’s most visible – in studios, on social media, and in the cultural imagination – tends to lead with the physical. That’s partly a marketing decision, partly a Western inheritance, and partly just the nature of what photographs well. The result is that millions of people have a minute picture of a practice that is genuinely extraordinary in its full scope.

You can come to yoga through āsana, and many people do, and that’s completely fine. But you can also come to it through the breath, or through meditation, or through the ethical inquiry of the yama, or through the self-study of svādhyāya. There are eight doors in, and none of them require a handstand.

If you’re curious about what a practice that actually works for your body and your nervous system might look like – that’s what I do. That’s the work I’m most interested in, and it starts exactly where you are.

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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.

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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.

Watch: Breathe. Let Go.

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.

Watch: Your Hands Work Hard.

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.

Watch: Close the Day.

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.

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This year’s birthday got me thinking.

Which isn’t unusual – birthdays tend to do that. But this one sent me somewhere specific: back to the mat. Back to the practice. Back to the question of what yoga has actually given me over the years, which turns out to be quite different from what I thought I was signing up for.

On the day itself, I did what I do most days. I unrolled my mat – not for content, not to plan a class or film something or tick a box, but because it’s the one thing that’s always brought me back to myself.

There’s something about another year passing that makes you want to stand somewhere familiar, somewhere honest; and for me, that place has a slightly worn corner and smells faintly of my current favourite wax melt or candle.

But here’s what I kept coming back to, sitting with it all: the mat isn’t actually the point. It never really was.

Some Time Ago

A few years ago (okay, more like twenty, let’s be honest about it) I would have told you yoga was something I did. A physical practice. A workout, almost. Something I squeezed in when I had the energy, which wasn’t often enough, because life kept happening in the way that life does.

I was fitting yoga around everything else: work, tiredness, the low hum of never quite feeling caught up. And when I made it to the mat, it was good – genuinely, good – but it was also finite. I’d finish, roll it up, and carry on as I was.

I didn’t know there was more to it than that.

I didn’t know that what I was dipping a toe into was actually an eight-limbed practice, thousands of years in the making, that had something to say about every single part of how I was living. Not just how I moved my body, but how I breathed, how I thought, how I related to other people, how I treated myself.

I didn’t know that yoga was going to teach me how to rest.

The Shift That Didn’t Happen on the Mat

Here’s what nobody tells you when you start doing yoga: the āsana (postures) – the bit most people think is yoga – is actually just one limb of eight.

The full framework comes from Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras, compiled somewhere around 400 CE, and it describes yoga as a path rather than a practice. Aṣṭāṅga yoga – eight-limbed yoga – covers:

• Yāma – how we relate to the world around us: values like non-harm, honesty, not taking more than we need
• Niyama – how we relate to ourselves: cleanliness, contentment, self-study, surrender to something larger
• Āsana – the physical postures. Yes, this one. But notice where it sits: third
• Prāṇāyāma – the regulation of breath and life force. The bridge between the outer and inner
• Pratyāhāra – withdrawal of the senses. The turning inward, the moment you stop reacting to every external thing and find there’s a whole inner world waiting
• Dhāraṇā – concentration, or single-pointed focus
• Dhyāna – meditation, sustained, deepening awareness
• Samādhi – integration. A state of wholeness that’s difficult to describe and easy to feel glimpses of, usually when you least expect it

I’m not listing these to make you memorise them. I’m listing them because when I finally encountered this framework properly and really sat with it, rather than just knowing it existed, something genuinely shifted for me.

The shift wasn’t on the mat. It happened because of what the mat kept pointing me toward: the breath; the quiet; the turning inward.

Learning How to Rest

I spent a long time treating rest and stillness as something I had to earn.

I think a lot of us do. We live in a culture that is relentlessly oriented toward doing – producing, achieving, optimising, being useful. Rest gets sold back to us as a reward for effort: you can stop when you’ve finished; you can relax when you deserve it; you can sleep when you’re dead, presumably.

Yoga – the full practice, all eight limbs – quietly dismantles that logic.

Prāṇāyāma teaches you that the exhale is not lesser than the inhale, that slowing down the breath isn’t weakness; it’s regulation. That your nervous system is not your enemy, and it responds to gentleness.

Pratyāhāra teaches you to come home, to notice that the world will continue making noise, and you don’t have to be swept away by all of it. That going inward isn’t avoidance; it’s discernment.

And yoga nidrā – which translates roughly as yogic sleep, and sits in the territory of pratyāhāra and dhyāna – takes all of that and holds it in one practice. You lie down. You are guided through layers of awareness. You stay conscious while your body does something very close to sleeping. And somewhere in that liminal space, the nervous system gets to exhale in a way it rarely gets to in ordinary waking life.

I didn’t learn to rest because someone told me I should – I learned because I kept coming back to these practices and they gradually, gently, made the case for it. Not through force or instruction; just through the experience of what it felt like on the other side.

What Birthdays Actually Ask of You

Birthdays are interesting. They arrive whether you’re ready or not, and they tend to ask questions you’ve been too busy to sit with.

What’s changed? What’s the same? What do you actually want?

I’ve started to think of them as a kind of annual pratyāhāra – a moment of turning inward that the calendar forces on you whether you’ve been practising it or not. A chance to withdraw from the noise for a moment and take stock.

This year, when I turn that gaze inward, a lot of what I find points back here: to this practice, and to the people who’ve been part of building something around it with me.

The people who come to classes and bring their whole tired, complicated, full lives with them and unroll their mats anyway.

The people who’ve lain down in community halls and trusted me to guide them somewhere softer.

The people who message me, who reply to emails, who turn up online and engage with ideas that most of the world still thinks of as fringe or strange.

You are part of why this feels worth doing. Genuinely.

I’m Still Learning. I Think That’s the Point.

One of the niyamas – the second of those eight limbs – is svādhyāya: self-study. Ongoing, honest, curious self-inquiry. Not self-criticism or a performance review. Just the willingness to keep looking, keep asking, keep being changed by what you find.

I’ve been practising yoga for twenty-something years and I am still a student of it. Not in a self-deprecating way: in a genuinely delighted way. The practice is that deep – there is always somewhere further in to go.

That’s what I love about teaching it: not handing people a set of shapes to master, but handing them a framework for understanding themselves. Watching someone find their breath for the first time. Watching someone discover they can lie still for forty-five minutes and not combust. Watching someone realise that the turning inward isn’t something to be afraid of.

That is yoga. All of it. Not just the shapes.

If You’re Curious About the Lying-Down Part

I teach yoga nidrā through an event called Strong Enough to Rest – and the name is not accidental. I t’s there because most people who come don’t feel strong enough. They come tired, overstretched, quietly depleted; they come because something in them recognises it needs what this offers, even if they can’t quite name it yet.

We gather, we settle, we go inward together.

You don’t need to have any experience of yoga. You don’t need to be able to touch your toes, hold a posture, or know a single Sáṃskṛta word (though if you want to learn some, I’m here for it). You need to be able to lie down. That’s the whole requirement.

If that speaks to something in you – whether you’re twenty-something and starting out, or twenty-something (or more) years in and just now finding the space to slow down – I’d love to have you there.

On birthdays, I notice what I’m grateful for. This year: this practice; our community; this ongoing, ever-deepening conversation with a tradition that has been asking the same questions of humans for thousands of years.

I’m still learning.

I think that’s the point.

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There is a belief so deeply embedded in modern life that most of us have never once questioned it. It goes something like this: rest comes after effort; rest is what you get when you’ve done enough – rest is the reward.

You’ve probably felt it: that low-level hum of guilt when you sit down before the to-do list is finished; the way a nap feels indulgent rather than necessary or just a lovely little treat; the internal justification you run before allowing yourself a quiet evening – well, I did do the laundry, and I answered all those emails, so I suppose I’ve earned it.

Earned it.

As though rest were a bonus, handed out only at the completion of certain goals by some invisible productivity manager, rather than a biological and psychological necessity. As though the body’s need to recover were conditional.

Yoga has something to say about this. Quite a lot, actually.

What The Eight Limbs Actually Teach Us

When most people think of yoga, they think of the physical postures – the āsanas. Downward dog (adho mukha śvānāsana), the warrior poses (vīrabhadrāsana I, II, and III), the satisfying click of a well-placed twist. And yes, the postures are part of it – but they are one limb of eight.

The sage Patañjali, in the Yoga Sūtras, laid out a complete framework for living – not just for moving. The eight limbs (aṣṭāṅga, literally “eight-limbed”) begin not with postures but with ethics: the yamas (observances toward the world) and niyamas (observances toward oneself); and it’s in the niyamas that we find something quietly radical.

Santoṣa.  Usually translated as “contentment”, but that’s a little flat. It would be more accurate to call it sufficiency – the practice of recognising that what is, right now, is enough. Not resignation or giving up on growth or change; just the active, deliberate refusal to locate your worth – or your right to rest – somewhere always just out of reach.

This is not a passive state. Santoṣa is a practice that requires you to notice, again and again, the voice that says not yet, not quite, almost, a little more – and choose, deliberately, not to obey it.

The Body Keeps the Score. But So Does the Nervous System.

We know, from both ancient wisdom and modern neuroscience, that the body needs rest to function. Sleep is not laziness, and stillness is not stagnation. The parasympathetic nervous system – the “rest and digest” state, the counterpart to the much-discussed “fight or flight” – is not a luxury setting. It is where healing happens, where memory consolidates, and where the immune system does its quiet, essential work.

Yoga nidrā, the practice of conscious rest that I’ve written about before, sits in this space deliberately. It is not sleep, though it may feel like it; it is a guided withdrawal of the senses – pratyāhāra, the fifth limb – that allows the nervous system to genuinely downregulate. Research suggests that 30 minutes of yoga nidrā may offer the physiological restoration of several hours of sleep – although it is not a replacement for sleep. It is its own thing: a practice of being held without doing.

And yet even in yoga classes, rest is often the first thing to be apologised for, “take a rest here if you need it,” teachers say – if you need it, as though needing rest were an admission of failure rather than basic physiology. I say this as someone who has been that teacher, and who is working to unpick it.

The postures prepare the body to be still. The breathwork – prāṇāyāma – settles the mind. The stillness at the end, Śavāsana (Corpse Pose), is not the cool-down – it is the point – the integration, the moment the body absorbs everything that came before.

But, often? We rush it. We skip it. We feel guilty for needing it.

A Brief and Personal Moment

I want to share something, briefly, because I think it’s relevant – and because I know some of you will recognise it.

For a while in my life, I lived with domestic abuse. After I left, I had no financial safety net. I mean that practically: if the very stressed seam were to split on my one old pair of jeans, there were no replacement jeans. Not until there was spare money, which there frequently wasn’t. You learn, in those circumstances, a particular kind of budgeting arithmetic – not the aspirational kind from personal finance books, but the grim, tight-chested kind where you’re always one small disaster away from a problem you cannot solve.

Rest, in that time, felt completely inaccessible. Not because I wasn’t tired – I was exhausted in ways I still don’t have words for – but because stillness felt dangerous. When you’re surviving, your nervous system doesn’t believe in rest – only vigilance.

I’m not sharing this for sympathy. I’m sharing it because I know I am not the only person who has carried that wiring long after the circumstances changed; because “you deserve to rest” feels like a hollow affirmation when your body has learned, for very good reasons, that it cannot afford to let its guard down.

Yoga didn’t fix that overnight. Nothing does; but the practices – the breath, the stillness, the slow teaching of the nervous system that this moment, right now, is safe enough – those things helped. And they continue to help.

Rest, for me, became less about earning and more about learning – that I’m allowed to take up space, that my needs are not an inconvenience, and that stillness is not the same as vulnerability.

Rest as a Class Issue (Even If We Don’t Say It)

Here is something the wellness industry almost never talks about: rest is not equally available to everyone.

Restorative yoga classes, spa days, yoga retreats, eight-hour sleep schedules – these are regularly presented as self-care essentials. And they can be. But they are also, often, the preserve of people with time, money, stability, and safety. People who aren’t working three jobs and living in survival mode; people who have somewhere warm to sleep and something to eat and clothing that isn’t held together with hope and safety pins.

The women and children living in clothing poverty in this country are not resting. They are managing; surviving; and doing the impossible arithmetic of not enough, every single day.

Yoga philosophy – particularly the concept of sevā, selfless service, which runs through the tradition as an ethical imperative – asks us to take what we have cultivated in practice and bring it outward. Not in a grand, performative way, but in a quiet, consistent, human way; because a practice that only serves the practitioner is only half a practice.

Which is why, this March, the proceeds will go towards my sevā – empowering women in clothing poverty through the choice of what they choose to wear, rather than picking from a limited selection of styles & sizes. I wanted to mention it here, in this context, because the connection feels honest: rest, peace, and space as a right, not a reward. For all of us. Not just those of us who can afford a yoga mat.

So What Does This Look Like, Practically?

I’m not going to tell you that a daily yoga nidrā practice will transform your life, though it might; and I’m not going to offer you a five-step plan for guilt-free rest, because the guilt isn’t really about the rest – it’s about what you’ve learned to believe you’re worth.

What I will say is this: your body is not a machine. It doesn’t run better under continuous pressure, and it doesn’t reward self-neglect with peak performance.

The Yoga Sūtras describe the goal of practice as citta vṛtti nirodhaḥ – the settling of the fluctuations of the mind. Not the perfecting of the body, orthe maximising of output. The settling.

Settling requires stillness. Stillness requires permission. And permission, it turns out, is something you have to give yourself – not because you’ve finally done enough, but because you are enough. Right now. Almost-seam-split jeans and all.

If you’ve been waiting to rest until you’ve earned it, I’d gently suggest: that moment isn’t coming. Not because you’ll never do enough – but because rest doesn’t work that way. It’s not at the end of the to-do list; it’s woven into the practice itself.

You don’t need to earn it – you just need to take it.

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You can find out more about Strong Enough to Rest here; or to book onto the March 8th event, click here. If you’re reading this after March 8th 2026, you can book your next Strong Enough to Rest session here; note you can filter on “Strong Enough to Rest” to see all of the upcoming dates.

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Yoga nidrā is a guided practice of deep, conscious rest that systematically settles the body while gently supporting the mind to remain aware. It’s often translated as “yogic sleep”, but this phrase can be misleading. Yoga nidrā is not about falling asleep on purpose, and it is not simply a rest at the end of a yoga class (that’s śavasāna). It’s a deliberate, structured practice that works directly with the nervous system and states of consciousness.

In a typical yoga nidrā practice, you lie down comfortably and are guided through a carefully sequenced journey; this may include awareness of the physical body, the breath, various sensations, imagery, memory, and/or subtle feeling states. You’re not asked to concentrate, analyse, or achieve anything – instead, you’re invited to listen and rest while the practice supports a gradual shift from doing to being.

What makes yoga nidrā distinctive is that it accesses a threshold state between waking and sleeping; and it is in this state that the body can enter profound rest, similar to deep sleep, while the mind remains lightly aware. This combination is what gives yoga nidrā its unique capacity to restore, regulate, and recalibrate.

What Yoga Nidrā Is Not

Because yoga nidrā has become more widely known in recent years, it’s often confused with other practices. Clarifying what it is not can help set realistic and supportive expectations.

Yoga nidrā is not simply a relaxation session or recording. While relaxation can certainly be a by-product, yoga nidrā follows a specific structure that guides the nervous system through layers of awareness, and It’s designed to support deeper physiological and psychological regulation.

It’s not mindfulness meditation lying down; you’re not being asked to notice thoughts, label experiences, or keep bringing your attention back when it wanders. In fact, drifting attention is part of how the practice works – yoga nidrā doesn’t require sustained focus or mental discipline.

It’s also not a nap technique, even though sleep may occur. If you fall asleep, nothing has gone wrong, especially when the body is depleted, sleep is often what is most needed. However, the intention of yoga nidrā is conscious rest rather than unconscious sleep, and over time many people find they can hover in this deeply restorative in-between state.

Yoga nidrā is not about fixing yourself; it’s not a productivity tool, a manifestation hack, or a way to become calmer, better, or more efficient. While some traditions include intention-setting (saṅkalpa), this isn’t about self-optimisation – it’s about meeting yourself as you are and allowing the system to settle.

Finally, yoga nidrā is not passive or “doing nothing”; although the body is still, significant processes are unfolding beneath the surface – brainwave patterns shift, stress responses soften, and the body receives signals of safety that are often absent in daily life.

What Is Happening Beneath the Surface

One of the reasons yoga nidrā can feel deceptively simple is that much of its impact happens beyond conscious effort – as the body becomes still and supported, the nervous system begins to move away from fight-or-flight patterns and towards rest-and-repair states.

Heart rate and breathing tend to slow, muscle tension releases, stress hormones such as cortisol may reduce, while parasympathetic activity increases. Over time, this can help the nervous system re-learn how to downshift more efficiently, rather than remaining stuck in chronic alertness.

At the same time, the mind is guided away from habitual thinking loops and towards sensation, imagery, and subtle awareness. This can create a sense of spaciousness and clarity that many people struggle to access through effort-based meditation; rather than trying to control the mind, yoga nidrā gives it somewhere softer to land.

Many people report that after yoga nidrā they feel clearer, steadier, or more “themselves”, even if nothing dramatic seemed to happen during the practice – this is a sign of integration rather than stimulation.

Who Yoga Nidrā Is Especially Supportive For

Yoga nidrā is often described as accessible, but that word can sound vague; in practice, it can be particularly supportive for people who find other forms of rest or meditation difficult or even unavailable.

If you feel constantly tired yet unable to fully switch off, yoga nidrā can offer a way into rest that doesn’t rely on willpower or effort. If your mind is busy, anxious, or emotionally loaded, you don’t need to quiet it first – the practice meets you exactly where you are.

For people experiencing stress, overwhelm, burnout, or emotional exhaustion, yoga nidrā can provide a sense of safety and containment that is often missing it’s also widely used alongside recovery from illness, injury, chronic fatigue, or long-term pain, because it doesn’t demand physical exertion or mental effort.

Yoga nidrā can also be particularly valuable for those who’ve tried meditation and felt they were “bad at it” – if sitting still, watching the breath, or managing thoughts feels frustrating or inaccessible, yoga nidrā often can feel more achievable and kinder.

You don’t need any prior experience of yoga, flexibility, or spiritual language; you don’t need to feel calm before you begin; yoga nidrā is designed for real, messy, tired people.

When Yoga Nidrā Can Be Most Helpful

Yoga nidrā can be practised at almost any time, but certain moments tend to highlight its benefits.

It can be deeply supportive when you’re exhausted but unable to sleep, when your body feels depleted yet your mind remains alert; it can act as a bridge between high arousal and rest, without forcing either.

During periods of stress, grief, transition, or emotional processing, yoga nidrā can offer a steady anchor – it doesn’t require you to talk through your experience or make sense of it cognitively, the body is allowed to settle first.

Many people also use yoga nidrā during the day as a nervous system reset – a short practice can sometimes feel more restoring than an extra coffee, a scroll through your phone, or even a little nap – especially when overwhelm or sensory fatigue is present.

There’s no ideal frequency or duration – some people practise for ten minutes; others for an hour. The most supportive practice is the one that feels realistic and sustainable for you.

What If Your Mind Wanders or You Fall Asleep?

This is one of the most common concerns, and it is worth addressing clearly.

If your attention drifts in and out, that’s not a problem – yoga nidrā doesn’t require continuous awareness to be effective; your nervous system responds to the environment of stillness, guidance, and safety, even if your conscious mind loses the thread.

If you fall asleep, this doesn’t mean you have failed: it means your system needed that type of rest, too. Over time, many people notice that as their baseline exhaustion reduces, they’re able to remain more aware during the practice without trying to.

There’s nothing to perfect, no performance to measure; yoga nidrā works precisely because it removes the pressure to do it “properly”.

How Yoga Nidrā Differs From Other Forms of Rest

Rest is often treated as something passive or incidental, but yoga nidrā approaches rest as a skill and a practice.

Unlike scrolling, zoning out, or collapsing at the end of the day, yoga nidrā creates conditions that actively support regulation; and unlike effort-based meditation, it doesn’t rely on discipline or concentration. Additionally, unlike sleep, it offers the possibility of deep rest without complete unconsciousness.

Many people discover through yoga nidrā that they have been resting less than they thought – not because they’re doing something wrong, but because true rest is rarely taught or prioritised.

A Different Relationship With Rest

At its heart, yoga nidrā is not about becoming calmer, better, or more productive; it’s about remembering how to rest in a way that is safe, and supported.

In a culture that often equates rest with laziness or weakness, choosing to lie down and do nothing can feel surprisingly challenging; yet yoga nidrā offers a gentle, structured way back to rest without asking you to justify it.

You do not need to earn this practice, you don’t need to improve yourself first, you don’t even need to understand it fully.

You simply need to lie down, listen, and allow yourself to be guided.

That, in itself, is the practice.

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In contemporary wellness spaces, the word mantra gets used with impressive confidence and very little care.

“I am calm.”
“I am abundant.”
“I am enough.”

These are frequently labelled mantras; sometimes lovingly, sometimes lazily, and sometimes with a confidence that suggests no further thought is required.

They may be useful in other practices – but these are not mantras, they’re affirmations.

Calling affirmations mantras isn’t just inaccurate – it flattens meaning, erases context, and treats an ancient spiritual technology as if it were interchangeable with a motivational slogan. It’s a bit like marching through a landscape, renaming everything for your convenience, and being surprised when people feel uncomfortable about that.

That’s not to say this is about gatekeeping or purity tests; but it is about clarity, respect, and effectiveness – because when various practices are muddled together, they tend to lose the very qualities that make them work.

What an Affirmation Actually Is

An affirmation is a psychological and cognitive tool.

At its simplest, an affirmation is a positive declarative statement, usually phrased in the first person, designed to influence beliefs, self-perception, or behaviour.

Examples can include:

• “I am safe”
• “I trust myself”
• “I can cope with uncertainty”
• “I am allowed to take up space”

Affirmations primarily work by engaging the thinking, meaning-making mind, and they function through several overlapping mechanisms:

Repetition

Repeated statements can gradually weaken entrenched mental patterns and strengthen new ones; over time, what once felt false or aspirational can begin to feel neutral – and eventually believable.

Cognitive reframing

Affirmations interrupt habitual thought loops and offer an alternative interpretation of experience, helping the nervous system and psyche move away from default assumptions shaped by fear, trauma, or conditioning.

Neuroplasticity

The brain changes in response to repeated mental activity. Affirmations are one way of deliberately practising new mental pathways, especially when paired with emotion, embodiment, or consistent context.

Emotional conditioning

When an affirmation is practised alongside feelings of safety, steadiness, or self-compassion, it can become associated with those states – making it easier to access them later.

Affirmations are meaning-based. Their impact depends largely on what they say, how believable they feel, and how honestly they’re used. When used poorly, they can veer into bypassing or self-gaslighting; but when done well, they can be genuinely supportive.

They belong comfortably in:

• Coaching and self-development
• Therapeutic and trauma-informed contexts
• Behavioural change work
• Confidence- and identity-based practices

None of this is a criticism – affirmations can be powerful tools; they’re just not mantras.

What a Mantra Actually Is

A mantra is not a positive sentence; it’ i’s not a belief statement; nor is it something you repeat in order to convince yourself of an idea.

A mantra is a sound-based mental instrument, rooted in specific spiritual and philosophical traditions – most notably within Hindu, Buddhist, and yogic lineages.

The Sanskrit root man means mind, and tra means tool or instrument.

A mantra is therefore:

An instrument of the mind

While mantras vary widely, they tend to share several key characteristics:

Sound over semantics

Although many mantras have translations, their primary function is not conceptual meaning: they work through sound, rhythm, vibration, and repetition – not through analysis or belief.

Nervous system regulation

The steady repetition of a mantra can entrain the breath, soothe the nervous system, and reduce mental reactivity. T his happens regardless of whether the practitioner is thinking about what the mantra “means”.

Attention training

A mantra gives the mind something precise and contained to rest on; rather than engaging thought, it gradually refines and simplifies attention, making it less scattered.

Lineage and transmission

Traditionally, mantras are taught within lineages and contexts that include guidance on how and why they’re used. This doesn’t mean they’re inaccessible, but it does mean they are not just interchangeable sounds.

Movement beyond the thinking mind

Where affirmations speak to the mind, mantras are designed to take you beyond habitual thinking altogether. They aren’t trying to fix your thoughts – they are training you not to be ruled by them.

A mantra is less like a sentence you believe, and more like a frequency you return to.

Why You Shouldn’t Call a Mantra an Affirmation

Calling a mantra an affirmation causes problems in two directions at once.

It misrepresents the practice

When people approach mantra as if it were an affirmation, they often:

• Try to “feel” whether the words are true
• Analyse whether they believe what they’re repeating
• Judge whether it’s “working” based on mood or thought content

This turns a non-conceptual practice into a conceptual one, and often leads to frustration or dismissal when it doesn’t behave the way an affirmation does.

It erases specificity and context

When every repeated phrase becomes a “mantra”, distinct traditions get blurred into a generic wellness soup.

Sanskrit becomes decorative; lineage becomes optional; practice becomes aesthetic.

This is rarely malicious – but it is careless; and carelessness is how rich, precise systems get reduced to vibes and a nice little singalong.

Why Affirmations and Mantras Both Matter – Separately

This isn’t an argument against affirmations: it’s an argument for using tools for the jobs they’re designed to do.

Affirmations:

• Work with belief and identity
• Engage narrative and meaning
• Help reshape internal dialogue
• Support integration and behaviour change

Mantras:

• Work beneath belief
• Stabilise attention
• Regulate the nervous system
• Create space from constant self-referencing

They operate at different levels of experience.

When they’re confused, both lose clarity; but when they’re distinguished, both become more effective.

How They Can Be Used Together (Without Trampling Everything)

Affirmations and mantras can absolutely coexist when neither is forced to masquerade as the other.

For example:

• An affirmation might be used before a practice to soften resistance or name an intention
• A mantra might be used during meditation to anchor attention beyond thought
• An affirmation might be used after practice to help translate insight into daily life

That’s collaboration, not colonisation; and nothing needs to be renamed, diluted, or flattened to justify its inclusion.

Precision Is a Form of Respect

Language matters – not because words are sacred objects, but because they shape how we relate to practices, cultures, and ourselves.

When we slow down enough to say:

“Here is an affirmation”; and “this is a mantra”; we can also say “these are different, and that difference matters.”

We practise discernment, respect, and yoga as relationship – not as branding.

And frankly, both affirmations and mantras deserve better than being mashed together just because someone couldn’t be bothered to learn the difference.

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If you’ve been to more than a handful of yoga classes, you’ve hopefully heard at least a few Sāṃskṛta (Sanskrit) words sprinkled throughout: tāḍāsana, adho mukha śvānāsana, ujjāyī, śavāsana. Some teachers use them consistently, some rarely, and some not at all.

And because the global yoga world has grown so quickly – often separated from its cultural and philosophical roots – students can understandably wonder:

Do Sāṃskṛta terms matter?
Is it necessary? Respectful? Outdated? Exclusive? Appropriative?
And what about “namaste” at the end of class – is that actually correct?

This post is my attempt to gently, clearly, and respectfully explore why I use Sāṃskṛta in my classes, courses, and materials, how to use it without gatekeeping or gimmick, and why I don’t close my classes with “namaste” (and why I think it’s worth reconsidering if you currently do).

Why Sāṃskṛta Matters in Modern Yoga

yoga has roots – and roots matter

Yoga didn’t begin in the West. It has a long, complex, beautiful history with deep connections to India’s spiritual, linguistic, and philosophical traditions. Using Sāṃskṛta doesn’t make a class “more authentic” in a superficial sense, but it does acknowledge that we are working with a tradition that predates us by thousands of years.

Sāṃskṛta is the language in which much of yoga’s philosophy was articulated:
the Haṭha Yoga Pradīpikā, the Bhagavad Gītā, the Yoga Sūtra of Patañjali.

By using even a little of the same language, we maintain a thread of connection to that lineage.

Sāṃskṛta is precise

One posture may have three (or more!) different English names – forward fold, standing forward bend, rag doll; but uttānāsana is always uttānāsana.

The same goes for prāṇāyāma: “victorious breath” is vague, even “ocean breath” is; ujjāyī prāṇāyāma is exact.

Sāṃskṛta provides clarity and consistency in a global teaching environment.

the language carries energetic intention

Sāṃskṛta is considered a vibrational language; its sounds are thought to influence the subtle bodies (kośa) and mind. Whether or not you take that literally, the rhythm and structure of Sāṃskṛta phrases often embody the very qualities yoga invites: steadiness, spaciousness, attention.

Using Sāṃskṛta Without Exclusion or Performance

One of the most common fears teachers have is that using Sāṃskṛta will feel elitist or inaccessible. My philosophy is simple: use Sāṃskṛta to include rather than exclude.

Here’s how I do that:

• Always pair Sāṃskṛta with English – not everyone recognises virabhadrāsana I, but everyone knows “warrior one”. Saying both helps students learn organically without feeling corrected or overwhelmed.
• Pronounce words respectfully – but don’t fear imperfection – language learners make mistakes, and may have speech impairments (like me). What matters for us all is sincere effort, not flawless phonetics
• Explain the meaning when relevant – generally speaking, students love knowing that supta means “reclining” or that utthita means “extended”. It makes the practice feel less like memorising foreign terms and more like connecting with a rich linguistic system.
• Use it for clarity, not aesthetic – Sāṃskṛta isn’t a branding tool and doesn’t need to be used performatively. If a term enhances clarity or honouring of lineage, use it; if it creates confusion, simplify.

The “Namaste Problem”: Why I Don’t Say It at the End of Class

This is a sensitive topic, and rightfully so; “namaste” has become nearly universal in Western yoga culture – but its use is often misunderstood.

Namaste is a respectful greeting in India, used in conversation the way we might say “hello”, “good morning”, or “thank you”.

It literally means: “I bow to you” (namaḥ = bow, te = to you)

It is not traditionally used as a ceremonial closing phrase for spiritual practices or classes.

When “namaste” was adopted into Western yoga studios, it was often wrapped in meanings it historically doesn’t carry: “I honour the divine in you”; “The light in me honours the light in you”; and so on.

These are poetic sentiments, but they are interpretations, not translations; and using a greeting as a sacred closing phrase has no basis in Indian cultural practice.

For many Indian practitioners and scholars, this misappropriation feels like a flattening of a living language into a spiritual catchphrase; and so ending a class with “namaste” doesn’t match linguistic reality, creates a veneer of spirituality, and can (perhaps unintentionally) contribute to misunderstandings about Indian culture.

If yoga is about truthfulness (satya), clarity, and awareness, it’s reasonable to question habits that don’t align with those values.

To summarise, I don’t use it because:

• It’s culturally inconsistent with how “namaste” is actually used
• It’s not necessary for a respectful or sacred closing
• I want to avoid perpetuating a misunderstanding
• I prefer to end class in a way that feels aligned, clear, and contextually respectful

Instead, I close with:

• A short moment of silence
• Gratitude or reflection
• A spacious breath
• A simple “thank you for practising with me”

This feels honest, grounded, and free from cultural misrepresentation.

So – should you use Sāṃskṛta in your yoga practice?

There’s no single correct answer, but here’s my gentle recommendation:

Use Sāṃskṛta intentionally, respectfully, with context, and use it only insofar as it deepens your understanding and your students’ experience.

We don’t need to mimic ancient India to honour yoga’s roots, and we don’t need to abandon Sāṃskṛta to avoid appropriation. There is a thoughtful middle path where we acknowledge origins, communicate clearly, and practise with integrity.

For me, that looks like using traditional āsana names, teaching with clarity, avoiding performative spirituality, and not ending class with “namaste” – not because it’s wrong in itself, but because it simply isn’t accurate for the context we’re in.

Yoga grows, evolves, and adapts, and as it does, we get to choose which parts of the practice we carry forward with intention, which habits we retire with gratitude, and how we make space for deeper understanding along the way.