good day practice no. 11
back to breath
Edition no. 11 · October 11, 2026
Last week, the body made itself very easy to write about. My back hurt. Standing up required thought. I was suddenly paying attention to movements I normally make without noticing them.
This week was much less eventful, despite my back still hurting.
Which, as it turns out, made Back to Breath a little harder.
We’re in the second week of a four-week exploration of body, breath, mind, and heart, the same four places I check in with at the beginning and end of most classes I teach.
Last week, we stayed close to sensation.
This week, I wanted to pay attention to the conversation happening around the breath: how it changes when the body has to work differently, what happens when a thought catches us, how quickly something internal can alter the way we breathe without any deliberate instruction from us.
The problem was that my mind kept trying to skip ahead (and ahead, and ahead, and ahead, etc, etc). Next week is Back to Mind, and my mind was asking me to jump there.
I kept thinking about the fact that I was spending all week asking people in class to notice the breath, let it interrupt the rush of thought, and listen to what it was telling them, while being particularly bad at taking my own advice. I would catch myself three steps ahead, planning next week or worrying about something that had nothing to do with the moment I was actually in, and then remember the thing I had been saying out loud to everyone else all week:
Come back to the breath.
So I would try.
Not for very long, necessarily. A few seconds of noticing an inhale, then the feeling of the exhale leaving. Before long I would be halfway into another thought and have to return again.
There was something mildly ridiculous about teaching a theme I was struggling to practice myself. But maybe that made the repetition more useful. I wasn’t coming back because I had mastered anything. I was coming back because I kept leaving.
And each time I did, even briefly, something settled.
THE CONVERSATION
We talk about “coming back to the breath” as though the breath is sitting somewhere quietly waiting for us to return. But it isn’t separate from everything else that is happening.
What became interesting in class this week was how often the breath seemed to know what was happening before we consciously registered it.
People would move into a more demanding shape and the room would get quieter. A long hold would end and you could hear a few sighs arrive almost at once. Sometimes I would cue everyone to soften something and realize I had been absorbing their held breath myself and feel a release once I reminded the room to breath.
It made the breath feel less like its own separate practice and more like one part of a much larger exchange. Effort changes it. Thought gets involved. Our internal response to what is happening changes it again.
And the conversation goes both ways. Sometimes noticing the breath was enough to catch the other thing happening underneath it: the gripping, the anticipation, the mind already moving toward what came next.
That was the part I wanted to dig into this week. Not using the breath to control everything else, but noticing how much everything else is already speaking through it.
THE part i kept missing
My tendency is to follow the thought.
One leads somewhere, which reminds me of something else, and suddenly I’ve spent ten minutes in a conversation happening entirely inside my own head.
Breathing is not nearly as entertaining. There is no plot. Nothing to figure out. Most of the time, it is just happening while I am busy paying attention to everything else.
Maybe that is exactly why returning to it can feel so settling. It gives the mind something uncomplicated to meet for a moment. Not another question to answer or future to work out, just something already happening where I actually am.
More than once this week, I caught myself deep into whatever had suddenly become very important and remembered the advice I had been giving everyone else.
So I tried my best to listen to it.
Not with any great success or for any impressive amount of time. But long enough to feel the momentum ease a little. The thought was still there afterward. My mind had plenty more to say.
It just wasn’t quite as loud. And then, when I wandered off again, there was somewhere to return.
The practice
Change the conditions
Lie on your back and give yourself a moment before doing anything.
Notice the rhythm that is already there.
Then lift one foot an inch or two from the floor.
Feel what changes when the body suddenly has a little less support.
You might feel the abdomen engage before you expected it to. See what happens to the inhale while you hold the leg there.
Then put the foot back down.
Wait.
Notice what happens when the effort is gone.
You can try the same thing by pressing your palms together or pressing one hand firmly into a block.
Create a little resistance, then release it.
The goal is not to keep your breathing perfectly steady.
You’re changing the conditions so you can feel the conversation more clearly.
The Soundtrack
The Poem
Conspire
On the back road
I gave my hand to the window, flat,
the way I did at nine,
and the air leaned on it like a shoulder on a stuck door
until it found the underside and lifted,
and the old trick worked again,
the palm tipped a few degrees into a wing,
the arm gone light to the elbow.
All of us live beneath a column of sky
the height of the whole atmosphere,
all that air pressing down
while something inside us presses back
with just enough force
for the sky to sit on us unnoticed.
It took a moving car
to make the air I breathe
press back hard enough to feel.
What came through my fingers
had already passed through the goldenrod gone to seed along the ditch
and the lungs of strangers in towns I had only driven through,
and before long it would be someone else's.
I have not always known what to do with mine.
I have held it in waiting rooms,
spent it arguing well past the point of being heard,
said I was fine and asked for help in the same breath.
I have left the wine open on the counter
to breathe,
and sat beside a friend long enough
for silence to become somewhere she could speak,
while keeping my own words held close.
Somewhere inside the word conspire
is the first meaning, before the word learned secrecy:
to breathe together.
The way the field and I were doing now,
each giving away what it had no use for
and the other could not live without.
Still, with every mile,
the breath I had once held tight in my chest
moved freely through my fingers.
The road kept pouring in
through the open window,
and my hand,
after so many years of bracing against it,
learned how to ride.
THE THROUGHLINE
I spent enough of this week getting pulled into my own thoughts that moving from Back to Breath into Back to Mind feels less like changing subjects and more like following the same thread. The breath gave me a way to notice the mind without immediately getting swept up in whatever it was saying.
Not every time. Not for very long.
But there were moments when I could feel the difference between having a thought and disappearing into it. That feels worth paying attention to.
The mind moves quickly. It reaches backward, jumps ahead, starts solving things that have not happened yet.
Breathing happens at another speed.
And maybe there was more logic to the order of this check-in than I realized when I first came up with the four part check-in. Body, breath, mind, heart. It moves from what feels most outward and tangible toward what becomes harder to see and name.
The breath sits somewhere in the middle. Close enough to the body that we can feel it happening, but connected enough to the mind that a thought can change it almost instantly.
So before we spend a week paying closer attention to all that mental chatter, we already have something quieter to return to when the volume gets high.
Not a way to stop thinking. Just a way to notice when we’ve gone somewhere with it.
And, occasionally, to come back.
SOMETHING TO CARRY INTO YOUR WEEK
When you notice yourself somewhere far ahead of where you actually are, come back for one breath.
You don’t have to stay there forever.
Just long enough to hear the conversation again.
Smile & sigh. Yay.
Let’s make a good day of it,
Bevin
come practice with me
If you’ve been coming to my Yin, Slow Flow, or Conditioning classes, my upcoming Strength + Stillness workshop brings pieces of all three together.
It’s meant for everyone, whether strength work is already part of your practice or you’re curious about where to begin. We’ll work with intentional resistance that supports the rest of your movement practice, spend time in stillness and relaxation, and you’ll leave with simple strength work you can continue at home.
And starting October 13, I’m adding a new Tuesday 7:30 AM Align/Flow class.
This one will feel a little different from a traditional flow. We’ll move through an alignment-based yoga practice while also borrowing from Conditioning, using weights as props to add resistance and feedback to familiar shapes.
If you’ve been curious about Conditioning but weren’t sure you wanted a full strength class, this could be a really nice place to start.
previous editions
