Helen Ludwig
Movement And Yoga

The day I went to my first yoga class, I was taken by a friend in my early twenties and it was a very gentle Vinyasa-style class on the first floor of a building in Cape Town CBD. I remember it so clearly because I came out of it feeling like I had had a full body massage. It was transformative, and from then on I was pretty hooked.

There are some obvious answers, but I think it's in a combination of factors. The first is just the deluge of information that we're bombarded with every day, and a lot of it is negative. So it's fear and crisis, a lot of the messaging we get is unnecessary, so I think that the cc field and the email that gets everyone copied unnecessarily has a lot to answer for. We feel barrage by it.

It helps the mind, firstly, by giving it something to focus on other than the crazy thoughts which are often whirling out of control. And in that, coming into focus on the body and on movement, it pulls you down into the body and it pulls you into the present moment as well. So you really just narrowing your focus to deal with what's right in front of you. 

I think it's a really good question because a lot of times, the first port of call is to do a mindfulness course or start yoga classes, or an intervention like that. But I think the real ticket to success is to try and introduce it into your culture and often the best way to do that is with rituals. And they can be quite small rituals. 

The first thing is to set boundaries, and really you've got to create your own space to do those. If there's no culture around you with rituals, you've got to create your own.

So, it's an example from this COVID period that we've just been through. There's a marketing executive in Johannesburg who noticed that her team was suffering tremendously from Zoom fatigue. Actually, I think in this instance it was Microsoft Teams fatigue, but it's an experience that many of us are familiar with, just not getting a break in the day from all the online meetings and the online engagement. So she set up something that she called Sunshine Hour. The idea behind that was, very simply, to just unplug for an hour and go and sit outside in the Joburg sunshine and take some time to reconnect with yourself.

It's very important for me actually, is the notion of starting small. I think a lot of people don't get to set up a regular habit because they're trying to bite it off in big chunks before they've even really given themselves a chance. 

What I find very useful is to manage the deluge. By that, I mean managing the flow of information and the flow of messages, and how you do that is up to you. So it might mean that you only check in on your email three times a day, although, obviously for some people that's impractical.

I think yoga is what you make it. In expression, it's a physical practice, so you're moving through a series of postures and one can approach it as a purely physical practice. I think when you combine it with breathing, there is, inevitably, a little bit of a mental effect so it's hard not to feel a positive shift from moving through a series of yoga postures.

The first, I think, most important thing you can do for your health, your stress management and your resilience is proper breathing.

So if you begin just by resting both hands on the lower belly, relax the shoulders and just stand comfortably and then bring the attention to the flow of your breath. Notice as it flows in and out of the body, and then invite it to flow deeply all the way down into the belly so that you can feel it rising and falling against your hands. And as you invite this deeper breath, you'll probably notice that your breathing becomes slower and steadier as well. This slow, steady, deep breathing just activates the parasympathetic nervous system, calms the body and brings everything into a more coherent rhythm...