⏱️ 3-4 Minute Read
If I don’t wake up and begin a daily practice of gentle, breath-focused movement—combining tension, relaxation, and awareness—it feels like mental and emotional self-neglect. In a world that constantly overstimulates the sympathetic nervous system, skipping these practices becomes a slow drift into dysregulation.
Depending on our age, health, and capacity, we each have to find the right balance between tension and release—between effort and letting go. When physical tension builds without conscious release, it stays in the body. The tension coils up inside us like a spring, tightening with every stressful moment. It takes energy to hold that tension back—energy that should be fueling our immune system, digestion, and healing. Over time, that coiled tension becomes mental tension. And the cycle reverses too: anxious thoughts create muscular tightness, shallow breathing, and fatigue. Agitation, distraction, and anxiety begin to dominate. The body and mind are not separate. They’re one dynamic system, feeding back into each other with every breath.
I exhale to relax my mind. I flex to move my body.
Most of the time, I’m doing both at once. Except in śavāsana—when I let everything go. Outside of that space, I stay in relationship with breath and movement. One informs the other. The breath leads. The body follows. The mind learns to listen.
I inhale gently to prepare, to arrive, to open space. I exhale to move, to act, to clear. That rhythm is what holds me together—not just physically, but emotionally. I’ve learned to soften my mind the same way: inhale into presence, exhale into the next moment quietly and without resistance.
When we lie in śavāsana, we release the residue of whatever the movement stirred up. We soften the diaphragm. We imagine it widening—left and right, not just rising and falling. We see it expanding in all directions on the inhale, and gently shrinking on the exhale. When I stay with that image, I can feel something recalibrating. This is how I return to homeostasis: not by force, but through breath—through the natural cycle of tension and release.
Exhalation is our natural purge. Inhalation is the refill.
They don’t always need to be balanced. Sometimes, I need more exhale to come down. Sometimes, I need more inhale to reawaken. One supports the other. That’s what it means to reset—allowing the nervous system to tilt toward what it needs, then return to center.
Relaxation, I’ve come to learn, is not collapse. It’s not giving up. It’s a conscious release, where just enough tone remains to keep the system awake. Even when I’m flexing, there’s softness inside the movement. That’s the paradox of conscious embodiment: tension and relaxation don’t cancel each other out. They coexist. They support each other. Right up until death—when the body fully relaxes, and the flex disappears for good.
And here’s something I’ve come to see clearly: yoga is missing a branch.
Without emotional processing—without trauma work, nervous system literacy, or self-inquiry—yoga is incomplete. I can stretch and breathe all day, but if I’m not addressing my emotional pain, my memories, and the core beliefs driving my reactivity, I’m only doing part of the work. I needed a way to include all of me in the practice. For me, real yoga means reintegration. Breath, movement, stillness, thought, memory, emotion—it all belongs. That’s the only way I’ve found peace that lasts longer than the class.