Anxiety. Overthinking. A mind that won’t switch off.

The Way Back to Stillness · Chapter 27 · pp. 186–187

Choose a position where your body feels held. Sit in a chair with both feet flat on the floor, or lie in bed with a pillow under your knees.

Place one hand on your chest and one on your belly. Feel the warmth of your own touch coming back to you. This is not a tense grip. It is a gentle placement, as if you were quieting someone you love.

Breathe in through your nose for a count of four. Notice the coolness of the air at the back of your throat. Breathe out through your mouth for a count of six, seven if it comes easily. Notice the warmth of the air on your lip and the lower hand sinking as the belly falls.

Keep breathing this way, and watch what comes. A thought will appear. Say it plainly to yourself, silently: there is a thought about tomorrow. Do not argue with it or finish it. Then bring your attention back to the hand on your belly, and to the count.

When you find you have followed a thought halfway down, you have not failed. Noticing is the practice. Come back to the hands. Come back to four in, six out.

Ten thoughts may come in a minute. Name each one and return each time. Each return tells the body that the watch can be set down.

Give this five to ten minutes, and give it especially in the last hour before sleep, with the lamp low and your hands where you can feel them.

Time to Heal · Chapter 6 · p. 62

Thirty minutes before bed, or when you wake unable to sleep, stand with your feet shoulder-width apart and let your arms hang loose.

Rotate your wrists slowly, five turns one way, five the other. Then lift your hands to shoulder height and roll your shoulders backward, slowly, ten times. The old texts describe this kind of movement as unwinding silk. Nothing is forced.

Afterward, place both hands over your chest, right crossed over left, and breathe softly for two minutes, feeling the warmth of your own hands through your clothes.

Excerpt from “Gentle movement for evening.” Educational reading, not a replacement for medical care.

Healing the Modern Soul · Chapter 3 · pp. 30–31

Write for ten minutes without lifting the pen from the page.

This is not composition. Nothing here needs to make sense or be well said. Put down the first thing that arrives, then the next one. The resentment you have been polite about. The memory that visits at three in the morning. The thing you have no name for yet. If nothing comes, write the words “I do not know what to say” over and over until something else comes.

Cross nothing out. Do not stop to weigh whether a sentence is worth writing.

Somewhere in those ten minutes you may feel a loosening below the collarbones, or a breath that goes deeper than the ones before it. Notice it and let it pass. Keep the pen moving until the time is done.

Then put the pen down. Place both hands over your heart.

Excerpt from “Soul Practice: The Journal of Release.”