43. Your yoga tiramisu

We all know that moment in the afternoon when your energy dips, and you really struggle to focus.

And often, our instinct is to push through - another coffee, another task, more effort.

But what if what you actually need… is a pause and a pick-me-up?

In this episode of the All of Yoga podcast, I’ll guide you through a short, layered practice - your yoga tiramisu - designed to help you reset your nervous system, clear mental load, and return to your day feeling more energised and focused.

Enjoy!

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Transcript

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Welcome to All of Yoga. This podcast explores, you guessed it, all of yoga, including the roots and history of yoga, how simple concepts from yoga philosophy can help us live a less stressful life, and how to approach the physical aspect of yoga in a safe and beneficial way. If you're brand new to yoga and wondering what it's all about, or you're an experienced yogi looking to learn more about all of yoga, this podcast is for you. As trainees start to prepare for our yoga teacher training, I send over a few journal prompts because I think journaling is a really valuable way to learn things about yourself in the moment and then to come back to reflect on how far you've come in a few months or a year. Anyway, so yeah, I give trainees a few journal prompts to get cogs turning about the ups and downs of life, about how and why things happen and much more. And one of these prompts is about what I call putting your order in. I realise that this can be really emotive. I also think it's really important. But I asked trainees to think of a time that something happened in their life that they didn't want and they didn't like and they wanted it to stop. But now, when they look back on it, they realise that that situation led to something good. Maybe they learnt something about themselves, they learnt a new skill, they met someone, they went travelling, or something else. In our philosophy study on the yoga teacher training, we will then talk about karma. And no, karma isn't your just dessert. Well, not necessarily. Karma simply means action. This follows that. This caused that. That happened, which led to this and then to that. With that in mind, surely it's a good thing that we can't just simply put our order in for life. If you could put your order in for exactly how you want your life to happen, you wouldn't have ordered that challenging thing, and so you never would have had the growth that followed. Now, I'm not saying that this is easy. I actually don't think it is easy. I think it's a huge shift from how many of us approach life, but I think it's incredibly beneficial. So, how can we weave this bit of ancient philosophy into our modern day lives? Well, I think it comes down to intention and control. Take a moment sometime this week to examine your intentions, your hopes, your dreams for where you want your life to go. And then be really honest with yourself about what you're doing or not doing to achieve this. And don't be hard on yourself. And then consider in an ideal world, would it be possible to work towards these dreams, goals, intentions with the understanding that you can't just put your order in and that something else might happen? Let's say you've always dreamed of opening a restaurant. So, with a view to making this happen, you train as a chef, you start looking at getting investments and you book viewings for potential locations around you. Can you pour your love into the workings of opening a restaurant without the gripping of it must happen? Again, I really, really want to emphasize that I'm not saying that this is easy, I'm just saying it's possible with lots of practice. It's probably also useful to remember at this point that yogis believe in reincarnation, implying it might take many lifetimes to get perfect at this. And so if your restaurant opens, well, woo-hoo, how exciting. But if it doesn't, you can't find a space, the investment falls through, you know, whatever. Could there be a little part of you that says, hmm, interesting, I wonder what's next. I also want to be really clear that there's another important part to this, which is that probably being human in this world and always saying, well, it wasn't meant to be, everything happens for a reason, fate, karma, everything happens for a reason, it wasn't meant to be, it wasn't meant to be, could well be spiritual bypassing, which is bypassing your emotions in the pursuit of spiritual study. No one's saying don't be bothered when things don't go as you'd hoped. But without spiritually bypassing how you feel, wouldn't it be nice? Wouldn't it be so cool to approach the challenges of life with the tiniest slice of, hmm, I wonder what's next for me. I'm really interested to see why that didn't work out as I'd hoped. So let's summarise what we've learned so far. A really useful tool for reflection when you have the time, the energy, and the brain space is to look back on something that happened in your life that was challenging, but then led to A or B or C, which you're very fond of. This is a reminder that we don't just get to put our order in for what does and doesn't happen in our lives. This can be frustrating and exceptionally challenging and emotional, but also it can be good immediately or years later. Knowing this and deprioritizing emotion when times are challenging could be spiritual bypassing, which I am absolutely not recommending. But I am recommending, in theory, and with lots of practice, perhaps being open-minded when things do happen that you didn't want or don't happen when that you did want. Wouldn't it be great to be able to pause whenever the time is right and think, I wonder what that was about. And there's another part to this which I think is really, really interesting, which is the modern physiology of what's going on here. And it says that this is very challenging for the brain. Brains love certainty, and that's kind of the problem, right? Our brains are trying to make sense of work hard, do this, do that, and this will happen. Because the alternative is uncertainty, which the brain does not like. Uncertainty often activates the amygdala, a part of the threat detection system in the brain that sets off the stress responses, the fight or flight response, and the HPA axis, which ends up releasing cortisol, the stress hormone. So, how do you learn to be at peace with uncertainty? Well, it takes effort and a lot of it. It also means consciously taking time to activate your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that's responsible for executive function. I think of it as the part of the brain that's responsible for choosing what you say, what you do, and so on. Because when this region, the prefrontal cortex, is active, it calms down the activity of the amygdala. I have a free lesson that talks you through this in much more detail, which is straight from my eight weeks to stress resilience course. You can get yours in the show notes. It'll guide you much more through these two parts of the brain, their function, their relationship, and then how to activate the prefrontal cortex. And that's it, yogis. That is our exploration of putting your order in with life. Or not, as the case may be. It is important to have goals and intentions and to go about achieving these in the best way you know how at the time, and then how exciting. Because you've done your bit and now it's time to see what happens. If your goal comes to fruition, well, woo-hoo. And if it doesn't, maybe in time it's leading to something more suitable for you. Doing this is not easy, it just doesn't come easily. We have to proactively and consciously take steps to keep the pre-frontal cortex active so that the amygdala, the threat detection centre, doesn't take over and make it all feel very fearful. And that's it. Don't forget to head to the show notes to get your free lesson about the inner tug of war between your amygdala and your prefrontal cortex. And as always, happy practicing.