There's a particular kind of tired that doesn't show up on your face. It lives lower. For me, it's in the chest, mostly. Sometimes in the jaw, the base of the throat, the slow brace that settles into your shoulders when your inbox loads. You've been running. Not literally. The kind of running where your your body has declared a permanent emergency and nobody told the rest of you. What a fucking trip.

Anywhoooooow that's kind of what this sequence, practice is about.

I've been teaching yoga and movement for years, and one of the things I know to be true is that the body keeps receipts, like real good ones and some are just shitty. Every deadline absorbed without a real exhale or pause. Every conversation that requires a weird sense of perfection we allow, and no one felt composed in the first place. Everything held together for someone else that nobody held together for ourselves. The body logged all of it.

This free yoga sequence, See What That Body Talk, is a phased practice if you've been swallowing things and not using your voice, intuition, inner wisdom, whatever you call it. And I don't mean that flippantly.

What stress actually does to a body in motion
Yoga for stress relief isn't primarily about flexibility. It's about signal.

When we're running on chronic stress, the body defaults to a particular shape. Shoulders round forward. Jaw sets. Throat constricts. Hip flexors shorten because they're bracing for action that never fully comes. The whole front of the body folds inward, protective, as if shielding itself from what's next, preemptive work. And because we adapt so well to the shapes we repeat, we start to live there. The braced position becomes the resting position. We stop noticing we're holding on because holding on has become ordinary.

I dare you to unclench your butthole right now. I know it sounds weird but trust you've been holding your glutes and all in a massive state of tension.

A somatic yoga sequence works by interrupting that pattern on purpose. Not with force. With invitation. The throat opener that starts this practice is intetesting. It's a kneeling position with the chin tilted slightly upward. But try it after three weeks of back-to-back meetings and a jaw that hasn't fully unclenched in a month, and see what happens. The body knows the difference between an ordinary day and a practice that says: we're doing something different here. Trust yourself.

That's the whole premise. Not to perform wellness. To actually interrupt the pattern and build trust.

What the sequence does and why it's structured this way

The practice moves through six phases. Not arbitrarily.

Phase One is just arrival. Three poses. All kneeling. No goals. Just finding the floor and the breath and the fact that you have a body that is here, on a mat, not in a meeting. The first pose in the whole sequence is a gentle kneeling throat opener, head tilting back, eyes closing. Some people feel the tightness immediately. Good. That means something is already listening.

Phases Two and Three work through the spine, the side body, the chest. This is where the sequencing gets intentional. Lateral stretches release the intercostal muscles between the ribs. Those muscles tighten when we breathe shallowly, which we do almost constantly under stress. Thoracic rotatins wring tension from the upper back. The kneeling wild thing, the seated crescent holds, the wide child's pose with arms stretched long across the mat. Each one is a conversation with a specific place that has been holding something.

Phase Four is earthier. Three-legged dog, low lunge with the back knee down and the hips sinking forward. This is the hip flexors. And if you've been carrying urgency in your body, the hip flexors are where it lives. Let them release for six breaths and see if your whole nervous system doesn't sigh.

Phases Five and Six are about rising. Not rushing. The crescent lunge series asks the body to open as it stands. The standing roll-down and roll-up sequence gives the spine a chance to arrive vertebra by vertebra, head coming last. And then the final phase does something that yoga guides rarely name out loud: it invites joy. Not performed gratitude. Not a forced smile. Just standing loose, letting the arms sway, letting the body shake out what remains. Letting the body remember it knows how to feel good when it's not bracing. Oooooh and do we ever dance, just move to your favourite song boo. No holding back.

The final pose is Lion's Breath. Mouth wide open. Sound escaping. As loud as you need it to be.

A note on what this practice is actually asking of you

There's a line I wrote for the guide that I keep coming back to: The deadline will still be there. But so will you.

What I mean is that this practice isn't asking you to opt out of your life. It's not anti-ambition. It's not "forget the work and just breathe." It's asking you to remember that the person doing all of that work is a person in a body. And that body needs more than performance reviews and project deadlines to stay functional and alive and actually present for the things that matter.

FSix phases. Twenty to thirty minutes. Break them Up, Put them together. Free, always. Yours, whenever the swallowing gets heavy.

If this practice helped you, share it with someone who looks like they haven't exhaled in a while. You probably know at least one.

See What That Body Talk Resource