Catherine Haylock Yoga

“I want longer hamstrings. I want my hips to open. I want stronger arms. But then I read that in yoga I’m not supposed to strive. So which is it, am I meant to give up wanting it?”

No, you don’t.

The wanting is what gets you to your edge, on the mat and everywhere else, the same thing at eleven at night when you’re working out whether you’re doing enough with your life.

What goes wrong is when it carries on past that edge, and you end up with a ni**le or an injury, or just lying there, stressing yourself out with nothing more than the thought of it.

Growth happens right on the line, where you feel intensity and not pain, and it stops the second you brace and get tense, whichever room you’re in.

✨ The edge, not the strain ✨ is up on Substack/Catherine Haylock | Yoga Teacher and on my ‘Reflections’ blog this week, link in bio↑.



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Think about what actually happens on the mat or on the cushion. We connect to the body and the breath, and that one connection is what keeps us centred, and once we're centred the mind and the nervous system follow along.

A daily morning practice reinforces that connection, of course it does, but the connection itself doesn't have to disappear just because there's no energy for the hour in the morning. It's already familiar to us, so it becomes a matter of training ourselves to hold it for the whole day, not only the hour we usually give it 😉

And once that's true, the morning hour stops being what decides whether we practise or not, the practice has simply moved into the day itself.

This is the work I teach one to one, the Inner Practice, yoga for the mind, no mat and no postures. If you want to know more DM me the words 'inner practice'. 🙏

I remember my Mysore students telling me they would come back to the daily practice once life had calmed down, once they were in the right space again. It's funny, because the practice is the one thing that could give us stability in turbulent times, and for some of us it becomes another drain of energy instead, energy we don't have to spare.

And that's the trap, the morning practice that would help is the one practice we have no capacity for. Knowing this doesn't get us out of it either, because knowing was never the part that was missing.

When it feels like the practice is only available to us on the days we can actually get to the mat or the cushion, and we've no capacity for it, that's enough to make us think we've lost the practice itself.

But what's actually gone is just the slot, the place in the day the practice used to take up. The practice itself is still there.

I wrote the whole piece on this on my blog 'Reflections', link in bio if you want to read on.

A morning yoga practice already gives us that connection to the body, and the confidence that comes with instantly feeling when something isn't right.

It's strongest right after practice, so all it takes is keeping a thread of that body awareness going through the day. The physical heart, the palms of the hands, wherever we can feel it. Because the body reacts before the story does.

Without that connection, the first we hear of it is once we're already deep into the argument in our head. And skipping past the feeling doesn't get rid of it, it just leaves it waiting for the next thing that provokes it.

👉 Save this for tomorrow morning, after you practise.

Small annoyances can rile us up, and it's often easier to just let them pass. But that's exactly why they're worth paying attention to.

The small stuff never asks much of us, which makes it the safest place to build a skill that matters a great deal once life sends something far bigger our way.

Notice where the annoyance actually shows up in the body, the chest maybe, or the belly, and just stay with it. Don't narrate it, don't run the story of what that person did and how irritating it was, the story is what keeps the emotion alive.

Just the sensation itself, and you'll see it disappears on its own within a minute or two. ✨

Discouraging thoughts don't show up when you're doing the small, familiar things. They turn up the moment something feels too big, when you're looking up at a mountain wondering how on earth you'll climb it.

The brain's first job isn't to make us happy, it's to keep us safe. It does that by trying to predict everything that could go wrong, and it reaches back to our past for the nearest old failure and holds it up as proof. “You couldn't then, so you can't now.”

The catch is the brain can't tell real danger from the merely unfamiliar, both signal threat. So at the exact moment something asks for courage, the voice gets loudest.

Those thoughts aren't a fault in you. They're the brain doing its job, a little too well.

Seeing that clearly is where the work starts, not with silencing the voice, but with no longer taking it at its word.

The work isn't to stop the thoughts. That's the misunderstanding that keeps us stuck for years, trying to think positively, trying to silence the voice, treating it as a personal failing every time it comes back.

It always comes back, that's what minds do.

The thoughts aren't the enemy. It's believing them that gets us into trouble.
A discouraging thought is only telling us we've reached the edge of our comfort zone, exactly where growth happens – if we let it.

We don't have to silence it, we just stop taking it at its word.

When I notice it, I tell my brain: “thank you brain for trying to protect me, but I'm ready to feel the discomfort and let it move through me.”

Simple, and it works. Every time you do it, you’re handing the brain new evidence: it's ok to feel discomfort, ok to let it move through, ok to change. Do it often enough and the voice eases on its own.

Where in your life is the voice talking you out of something right now?

When we manage to catch the mind in the act, even a second or two earlier than usual, we get a sense that we're not simply at its mercy. That we have some influence over what happens next.

Most of us already know how to calm ourselves down. We can do some breathing, sit for a meditation, go for a walk, and it helps while it's quiet.

The harder part is what happens once the quiet is gone. An email comes in, or a conversation goes somewhere we didn't expect, and we're straight back in the same loops, turning it over, working out how it might all go wrong.

What I've become most interested in over the last few years is what we can do in that moment, while life is still going on around us, so we don't get pulled in quite so far or for quite so long.

✨ That's what I want to explore in this workshop:
"Get out of your head – what to do when calming down isn't enough"

👉 Saturday 27th June, 10am – 11.30am UK time
Online, live, no recording, £15

There'll be some teaching, a little reflection, a few simple practices, and time to notice your own patterns. You don't need any experience with yoga or meditation to come.
It's a starting point, not the whole of the work, but ninety minutes is enough to feel that something else is possible.

Find out more here: https://catherinehaylock.com/mini-workshop-get-out-of-your-head/ 💛

We often hear: calm the mind, and everything follows.

But sometimes the mind is too full to be calmed directly.

A breathing exercise works in the moment, but the calm doesn't last. And "just notice your thoughts" feels like one more thing we're not doing.

In those moments, we don't need to calm the mind, we need to see it first.

Write a few sentences about what's actually going on.

Not the story, not how you feel about it, not a reliving of what happened. Just what's been triggered in you, without adding more narrative to it.

A few questions that can help:
✨ What am I telling myself right now about myself?
✨ What's fact, and what's the story my mind is adding to it?
✨ What am I assuming is true that I haven't actually checked?

Most emotions are triggered by thoughts. Getting a bit of clarity on the thoughts creates space. And once there's space, the simpler practices become possible again, a yoga nidra, a breathing exercise, nothing fancy.

Slowly slowly, calming the body starts to calm the thoughts too.

The reorder is small, but it can get you out of the loop.

There's a strange comfort in watching something emotional on TV.

You laugh, you cry and you feel the suspension. But the moment you switch it off, the emotions are gone.
Because they weren’t yours.

Borrowed feelings give us the impression of being alive without asking anything of us, it's safe.

Unlike our own emotions, which don't dissolve, which can't just be switched off, which we often don't want to feel.

You avoid stillness at all costs.

You know practices that could help, but you don’t do it.

I wrote about what actually helps, and what to try when the usual practices are out of reach.

It's my first piece on Substack 🤗

If you want to read more, sign up to my Substack.
https://substack.com/