What’s yawning got to do with inner growth and body-mind regulation? Quite a lot, as it turns out.

In a previous post, we looked at ‘the space-maker breath’ — that satisfying, double-inhale click that resets the nervous system’s communication loop. But if you have been paying attention to your body’s attempts to regulate lately, you might have noticed another, more forceful character entering the room: the yawn.

It turns out that while that sigh — or ‘bottoming-out’ breath — functions as a mechanical reset for the lungs, the yawn is a high-velocity thermal and neural reset for the brain.

The etiquette of bracing

Before we get to the mechanics, we have to talk about the manners. Modern society has a strange, persistent habit of attempting to edit out our most effective regulatory tools. It’s like a collective superego looming over us, frowning judgemental on visible regulation, implying we should all be perfectly in control, with no need to regulate in the first place. We are taught from childhood to cover our yawns, to swallow our sighs, and — as I have explored previously both here and, with regard to crying, on The Enneagram Way — to treat any visible sign of somatic discharge as a social lapse. We have turned a biological necessity into a taboo.

Subscribe now

But when we stifle a yawn in a meeting or suppress a sigh to appear professional, we aren’t just being polite; we are telling the nervous system to stay in a state of bracing. We’re effectively refusing the reset the body is begging for. That’s why reclaiming these dynamics — yawns, stretches, sighs, and tears — is a radical act of somatic growth. It is the transition from ‘performing calm’ to actually being regulated.

More than just oxygen

We have been told for decades that we yawn to get more oxygen, but science has largely debunked that. And, just like with that alveoli-popping breath that I wrote about previously, if it were about oxygen, the ‘space-maker breath’ we discussed previously would be the only tool we would ever need — unless we could just breathe deeper. But it’s not, and we can’t.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, yawning hasn’t been high on the list of things to research in the human system throughout the years, even though it’s picking up a bit of interest now. The most compelling current theory is that yawning acts as a biological radiator. Your brain is an incredibly ‘expensive’ organ, generating a lot of heat. When brain temperature rises — due to exhaustion or intense cognitive focus — cognitive efficiency dips. This is a form of metabolic stress.

The yawn seems to constitute a mechanical solution to this thermal problem. The deep inhalation of cool air, combined with the forceful stretching of the jaw, increases blood flow to the skull and neck, helping to cool the brain. This is why we yawn when we are tired: our body is desperately trying to keep the lights on by splashing cold air on the brain from the inside out.

The waiting room and the manual brake

There is also a second, distinct type of yawn that has less to do with temperature and more to do with emotional or anticipatory stress. You have likely seen this — the dog at the vet’s office yawning incessantly, or yourself yawning right before a big presentation. This is a displacement activity.

When your nervous system is stuck in high alert but you have no physical outlet — you cannot run away from the waiting room or fight the interviewer — the body idles the engine. Here, the yawn isn’t a radiator; it is a manual brake. While the ‘space-maker breath’ pops open the alveoli in the lower lungs to shift your chemistry, the yawn stretches the architecture of the throat to stimulate the vagus nerve.

Share

This sends an immediate slow-down signal to the heart, demanding a state-shift when the environment feels overwhelming. It is the body’s way of trying to reconcile an internal state of high arousal with a physical requirement to stay still.

The counter-intuitive empathy yawn

This brings us to a particularly awkward intersection of biology and manners: the empathy yawn.

Perhaps you’ve been there — sitting with a friend who is recounting a deeply moving, perhaps traumatic, experience. As you listen, leaning in with genuine care, you suddenly feel the unmistakable, tectonic shift of a yawn beginning at the back of your throat. To the social mind, this is a disaster; it feels like the ultimate sign of boredom or indifference.

But if this is you occasionally, know that, somatically, the opposite is actually true. Because of our mirror neurons, we often ‘tune in’ to the nervous system of the person across from us. If they are in a state of high emotional charge, your system may pick up that charge and attempt to regulate it on their behalf. You aren’t secretly bored by their story; your system is attempting to process the shared emotional intensity.

This is a form of co-regulation that has been mislabelled as a social slight — and recognising this can change the way we show up for others. In case you feel that seemingly rude impulse while a friend is opening up, next time — whether you actually give space to it or not — you can recognize it for what it is: your system being so deeply present with them that it has started trying to help with the heavy lifting of regulation.

Exploration: Reclaiming the discharge

Instead of a step-by-step exercise, this time I want to invite you to become a non-judgemental witness to your own ‘anti-social’ impulses. Here are a few things you might observe as you give your system permission to take the lead:

• The ‘unstifled’ experiment | Next time you feel a yawn or a sigh coming on in a safe space, give it more space than usual. Don’t cover it. If you can, let the body take the lead. Let the jaw drop fully; let the sound out. Notice if the click of satisfaction of an alveoli-re-inflating breath feels different when you aren’t trying to hide the process from a collective or personal superego.

• The vagal ​release | Notice the tension in the sides of your neck and jaw during a yawn. Does a wider, more intentional stretch lead to a specific ‘completion signal’? For some, this is a shiver down the spine; for others, it is a vocalised sigh — or even a stronger, guttural sound — a softening of the tongue, or watery eyes. While the ‘space-maker breath’ feels like a release in the chest, this yawn-driven discharge is the sign of the nervous system finally dropping a braced state in the head, neck, and jaw.

• ​Radiator, brake, or ally? | Notice when your yawns feel hacking or fragmented. A ‘hacking’ yawn often signals a high level of sympathetic pressure that is struggling to find an exit. Are you actually tired? Are you anticipating a conflict? Or are you simply in the presence of someone else’s high-charge energy? Just recognising which tool your body is reaching for — the thermal cooler, the vagal brake, or the empathetic mirror — can help you see where you are over-extending or over-absorbing.

• ​The social mirror | Observe your reaction when someone else yawns or sighs. Do you feel a momentary urge to judge it as boredom, or can you recognize it as another human system attempting to find its way home to regulation? And, not least, is it contagious? If your own body picks up the yawn, is it OK to allow it to happen?

  ---

Reclaiming these regulators is about moving away from a purely mechanical view of wellness and toward a more responsive presence. When we stop shaming our yawns — along with our sighs, stretches, and tears — we start trusting our bodies.

How does your biological radiator feel today? ❤️

Leave a comment

There is a subtle trap hidden in the concept of self-worth — or, rather, the lack thereof. It sounds entirely reasonable, and it goes something like this:

‘I don’t feel worthy, and I would like to. So where can I find my worth?’

The trap enters the equation by making it sound like the task is to produce a sense of value. And once that assumption slips in unnoticed, a curious thing happens: the part of us that already feels deficient takes charge of the project.

Then, this part proceeds to work diligently towards Feeling Worthy. It starts attempting to improve itself. Heal itself. Understand itself. Meditate itself. Acquire knowledge about this ‘me’ in the hope that this will open the way to more improvement, healing, understanding, and even presence. And the irony, of course, is that this process often reinforces the very dynamic it is trying to resolve — because the underlying message remains: ‘Something about me is not quite acceptable yet.’

This might become particularly apparent in meditation, in our attempts to sit quietly — only to discover anxiety, or shame, or self-criticism, or just numbness. When this happens, usually a judgement appears: ‘I shouldn’t be feeling this’, or ‘I need to get past this.’ Sometimes, this judgement might even take on a more spiritual flavour, as in, ‘I wonder what this might be trying to teach me.’ Occasionally, the latter is a genuine question — but even when it is, it offers a form of escape, keeping any exploration strictly to the mental realm.

The mind can be remarkably creative when it comes to avoiding direct contact with direct experience. Sometimes, anything seems preferable to simply sitting with the possibility that, right now, the sense of worth is not available to experience. And, interestingly, this isn’t because the experience is so unbearable, necessarily — but because it feels like evidence. Proof that something is wrong. Proof that we have failed. Proof that all those books, workshops and meditations have apparently had zero effect where it truly matters. Or so it feels.

Read more

In my last essay, I made some reflections about the innate value we all have. Regardless of whether we’re big ‘believe-in-ourselves’ kinds of people or more modest and even insecure, self-worth can be a multi-faceted beast indeed — which is why I promised to follow up with a few deepening reflections for paid Zero-Bypass Growth subscribers.

Because let’s face it: it’s not always a straightforward thing. If ‘inherent worth’ were something we fully lived from, consistently and without exception, a lot of the tensions we carry would become unnecessary. If we look closer, we might see that much of what creates subtle friction in our interactions with others is not necessarily disagreement, nor even difference — but a kind of negotiation; a quiet attempt to secure or stabilise a sense of value.

This negotiation, of course, tends to play out below the level of conscious intention. It rarely announces itself as a clear, ‘I am now going to seek validation because I do not feel inherently valuable’. No — it shows up in smaller, more socially acceptable ways. Like, the extra sentence added to make sure something lands well. The slight adjustment of tone to avoid disapproval, or to persuade, promote, defend. The careful calibration of how much of oneself to reveal — and how much to hold back.

Read more

In inner growth circles, the question of personal worth often surfaces. Do I have it? It feels like I need to perform, or I don’t. Or, Sure, I feel it, but only if I’m doing what my superego tells me. Or, What, of course I have value — just look at all my accomplishments! But whichever way we lean, this matter isn’t something most of us are likely to review on a regular basis. It tends to operate more like background software — quietly running things while you get on with your day. Which works well enough. Until, of course, it doesn’t 😎.

When I started to look, it seemed a lot like that our entire existence must rest on an inherent worth as individuals. Like without it, we simply wouldn’t be here. Because let’s face it — the universe isn’t in the habit of carrying dead weight. Sure, scientists throughout the ages have been arrogantly labelling anything they didn’t yet understand as meaningless (‘empty space’, or ‘junk DNA’, anyone?), but looking closer at nature, we invariably discove…

Read more

Breathing. There’s just something about it. At some point in my life, I started having the occasional craving for a breath that went further; one that felt ‘filling’ in a way beyond the ordinary in-and-out happening all the time. At first, I thought it was just about oxygen. But if it were, a handful of quick, deep breaths would serve the same purpose — and it was clear they didn’t.

I discovered that sometimes, when this urge came, my body would spontaneously shift slightly so that the upper parts were lifted ‘off’ the hips or, if I was lying down, so that the chest area arched away from whatever I was lying on. It was kind of fascinating — as was the very clear ‘click’ when that in-breath hit the sweet spot and the lungs felt finally properly filled.

Maybe this sounds familiar — this sudden itch for an extra-deep breath. You inhale, but it feels truncated just short of satisfying. You try again, a deeper breath, but the air feels kind of thin; it doesn’t quite land.

Then your body shifts a little bit, and you draw in a long breath, perhaps in multiple parts. And suddenly, there it is: a physical click of satisfaction, followed by an, involuntary sigh. Your shoulders drop. Your jaw softens.

Much of what we do in the way of inner practice has its roots in biological necessity; many breath practices, for sure. This specific phenomenon — the quest for the ‘satisfying breath’ — is one of the most direct ways to observe your nervous system attempting to move from a state of bracing to a state of being.

It’s not about oxygen

When we feel that ‘air hunger’, it's easy to believe what we’re after is more. However, if we start huffing and puffing, we quickly notice this rarely solves the problem. This is because this hunger isn’t actually for oxygen. If it were, simply increasing your respiratory rate would fix the issue.

Instead, this is a neurological signal. Your brain isn’t asking for more chemistry; it is asking for a specific type of mechanical feedback.

Deep within your lungs and the lining of your chest wall are millions of tiny sensors called pulmonary stretch receptors, whose primary job is to communicate with the brain via the vagus nerve. They serve as a sort of ‘check-in’ system for your internal signal. Your brain isn’t asking for more chemistry; it is asking for a specific type of mechanical feedback.

Deep within your lungs and the lining of your chest wall are millions of tiny sensors called pulmonary stretch receptors, whose primary job is to communicate with the brain via the vagus nerve. They serve as a sort of ‘check-in’ system for your internal state. When these receptors are stretched to a specific threshold, they send a signal to the brainstem (triggering, specifically, the Hering-Breuer reflex) that says, ‘We have reached capacity. It is safe to let go.’

That feeling of satisfaction — the threshold you feel you need to reach — is the moment your brain acknowledges that signal. If your body is held in a pattern of tension, or if your posture is collapsed, those receptors never quite get the stretch they need. You stay in a state where breathing feels vaguely incomplete, which the brain interprets as a subtle, persistent signal of ‘not-quite-safe’.

The trap of the mechanical manual

There is a profound difference between performing a breathing exercise and experiencing a physiological reset. Below, we’ll look at the neurological signal your brain is actually waiting for, why many breathing tools don’t do the trick to, and a specific practice to help your system find its own way home.

Read more

Do you love reading about inner work? Do you enjoy following the insights of others, discovering how our inner terrain seems to be connected, and exploring new maps of the human experience? If so, you aren’t alone. Many of us find this process deeply inspiring. It’s a vital part of the journey — but we need to be honest about what is actually happening when we engage with it.

The constructive mind vs. true insight

When we read or listen to growth work, we are primarily engaging a specific faculty: our linear, constructive mind. This part of us is brilliant at sorting, categorising, and assessing information. It loves ‘understanding’ and ‘knowing’. (You can read more about head centre intelligence in general and the constructive function in particular in the previous post When the mind relinquishes control.)

Because words and language are the primary tools o…

Read more

We often speak about our emotions as if they are automatic and justified responses to our environment. The traffic jam ‘makes us angry’, a thoughtful gift ‘brings joy’, or a looming deadline ‘makes us anxious’. And sure — in our lived, linear experience, our internal weather is mostly a reaction to the external climate. Whether we consider ourselves particularly ‘feeling’ people or not, we become experts at scanning the horizon for the next cause of our discomfort, convinced that if we could only manage our circumstances, our inner lives would finally settle into peace.

But what if we have the relationship backwards? What if the events we blame for our moods are not the architects of our feelings, but merely the hooks we hang them on?

At their core, emotions are forms of energy — or, for the scientifically inclined, chemical processes — that arise naturally within the body. Rather than just providing a feedback system to tell us whether things are ticking along smoothly or not (and if not, to encourage us to change said ‘things’), emotions seem to possess a function, in themselves, as they are. We don’t know what function this might be, exactly, but we have pointers that indicate it’s there.

Read more

‘My heart sank.’ ‘I feel hollowed out.’ ‘He gets under my skin.’ ‘It makes my blood boil.’

Our languages have expressions pointing to something science has only relatively recently begun to grasp: that emotions are physical phenomena — a flow of chemicals through the body. How do you treat your flow? Do you clamp it shut as tightly as possible and hope the tap won’t start leaking, or do you turn it on full and stand in the middle of it until you’re nearly swept away?

Sometimes it’s hard to notice our own ways of being, but looking around you, I’m sure you find both people who seem to prefer to live as free of emotions as possible and others who seem to wallow and expand on the slightest … slight. The interesting thing is, while these two may seem like opposites, despite their differences they create the same problem. Regardless of whether we exaggerate our feelings or attempt to stifle them, it keeps us in the dark about their energy, their actual function, and what they are trying to t…

Read more

The ego (and if you haven’t been around me long, you might like to look here or here what I mean by this term) likes to think in terms of separation. Or, well, perhaps not likes, exactly — it just believes we are separate, and that there’s ‘others’ out there which we need to relate to in one way or another. And in this, it finds one of its most reliable trump cards: projection. A psychological projection is created when certain traits, often those that we reject in ourselves, are attributed to others. It is as if the psyche were a projector, casting a trait, desire or quality onto another person as though they were a screen, or a canvas. With a film projector, the image resides in the projector itself, even if it appears to be on the screen.

The psyche operates in much the same way; what is seen is assumed to belong to someone else, shaping both one’s overall perception of the world and what is perceived in specific individuals. Key term being, perceived in. When this is happening, it’s irrelevant whether our ‘projectee’ actually does possess or express the quality in question; we simply can’t tell, since whatever is already there is overshadowed by whatever we project.

Read more

What the ego is and isn’t is to some extent down to what we agree on. Some use ego to refer to the ‘bad’ parts, while the ‘good’ parts are considered ‘not ego’.

If we go back to Freud, though, the ego is what we'd call the ‘everyday me’ — my self-image, my stories absolute myself, my memories, my talents, my habitual ways of being, my idiosyncrasies; simply, me. In his model, the ego was nestled between the ‘id’ — the seat of instinctual, mostly unconscious drives — and the ‘superego’ — internalised rules, prohibitions and decrees ascertaining that we (as in, the ego) don't stray too far from whatever we ought to be or do.

This means the ego is a) both the good and the bad about us, and b) not real. As in, it's not a Thing; an entity in its own right. I suppose you can say that in a way, the ego is like a shadow. Not in the sense of disowned or sinister qualities, but more literally — a holographic illusion that, just like the shadow that appears when something blocks the light, arises …

Read more

When invited to ‘let the body decide what it wants’, some people object: ‘Well, then I’d just go to the fridge and take out something nice. That’s what my body wants — and it’s being loud and clear about it!’ Yet one area where increased awareness of the body can make a surprising difference is precisely in relation to cravings and dependencies — those moments when the body seems to long for something: chocolate, nicotine, sex, or any number of other delights.

At such moments we are given a curious opportunity: the chance to deepen our contact with the body. If we remain present and direct our attention to the craving as it appears in and travels through the body, an interesting experiment becomes possible. For me, the experiment first happened quite spontaneously when I found myself longing for chocolate. Instead of getting up, I stayed on the sofa and focused on the sensation in my body. What exactly did it feel like? And, more interestingly — how did I know so certainly that it was …

Read more

If you’ve been with me a while on various channels, or if you’ve done courses like The Crash Course on Patterns, then experiential, non-judgemental presence and somatic exploration will be familiar territory — at least in theory. And if you’ve been around the block once or twice with deeper psycho-spiritual work of any sort, you probably know it in practice, too.

Especially when we feel we know what’s going on, either from intellectual insight or through personal experience, it’s easy to get a bit ahead of ourselves. I remember a friend saying many years ago: ‘I see myself doing this thing — again — and I know it isn’t ideal and that it’ll come back to bite me later in one way or another. And I get so curious: why? Why can’t I just … not do it? I’d give anything to know.’

Read more

“Picture an infant. It hasn’t got a lot going on except the body. Feelings are very primal and mostly instinctual, and the whole organism is busy growing, developing. It’s occupied with all the small bits that this requires — eating, drinking, pooping, peeing, sleeping, feeling safe or not feeling safe, expressing needs as best it can and generally figuring out this thing called life on Earth.

Now, I’m not suggesting we go back to infancy, bawl when we’re hungry, or pee the moment the need arises. I am suggesting, however, that the in­fant has a perfect connection to and awareness of its body. Instinctual impulses and emotional reactions are acutely registered and felt because there is yet no rational mind that can question or reason around them. As adults, we have not only this mind, but also a general understanding of how the world works, what’s expected of us, and what normally happens in a situation. If we are hungry on the way home from work, we know that we will be able to eat so…

Read more

So, one we ‘suspend the fix’, as per last week's suggestion, we might realise it's not one set of impressions, sensations, or reactions in there, but a variable stew. Some way into this inner journey, I noticed that when I felt off-kilter, it was sometimes surprisingly difficult to work out what on earth was actually going on — let alone the different layers of it which often revealed themselves once I cared too look closer. That knot in my stomach — what is it actually struggling to contain? Which situation or thought stirred up that vague-but-definitely-there sense of unease — and what does the unease even consist of, once I tune in more closely?

The inner chorus

Once things started to clear in any given situation, I often discovered a virtual ensemble cast of feelings and reactive patterns. Perhaps there was a defiant six-year-old who feels unfairly treated, an adult woman trying to solve a concrete problem, a seasoned practitioner attempting to make sense of proceedings, and a precocious teenager determined to hold her head high and appear impeccably composed. And occasionally, for extra seasoning, there’d be emotional leftovers from a film I’d watched that week, an article I’d skimmed, or some wildly unrelated spat on Facebook.

Read more

If we’re serious about zero-bypassing, the first order of business for most of us will be an interruption of sorts. If we look more closely, most of our attempts at ‘inner work’ are actually subtle acts of aggression. We notice (or sometimes don’t even notice, as the case may be) a tension in the solar plexus or a sudden narrowing of our field of vision, and the ego immediately goes to work. It categorises the sensation as ‘anxiety’ or ‘stress’, or in any case decides it is a problem to be solved. And begins its search for a tool to make it go away.

If we’ve been doing this work for a while, perhaps we do consciously notice these things happening. If not on the fly, then at least later, on our meditation cushion, or when reflecting back. Then we might try to breathe into it, reframe a certain thought, or otherwise ‘release’ the energy. (If you read my book Aspects of You, you recognize this as ‘neutralising the charge’.) But however we do it and whatever we call it, in our haste to fi…

Read more

Let’s face it — most people think almost all the time. On that basis alone, the head centre — our cognitive intelligence — ought to feel intimately familiar. And yet, paradoxically, we make remarkably little use of its actual strengths. This is primarily because of two bad habits: firstly, using the head centre as the be all, end all of life (at the expense of the other two faculties), and secondly, largely or completely missing out on one of its two parallel functions.

Read more

The heart. This concept really covers a lot of ground in our human experience. In recent decades, the heart centre has enjoyed a noticeable rise in cultural status. At least in theory. We speak about emotions more openly than before, and certainly more than we speak about instinct. Even so, ‘heart matters’ are still often treated as optional extras — something to tend to once the important work is done (by which we usually mean ‘thinking and rationalising’).

Read more

You know how we say, I felt it in my gut, or I need some time to digest this information, or even I can’t move past this? These turns of phrase aren’t purely stylistic imagery — they rely on our knowledge about an ancient, hard-coded aspect of our being. This aspect is often called simply ‘the gut’ or ‘the instinctual centre’, and it’s one of three essential faculties of intelligence. In this article, we look at the basic aspects of this intelligence, ending with a simple exercise to allow it to introduce itself.

Read more

Are you ever told that you ‘shouldn’t take things so personally’? Or do you notice that you do — in a way that ends up feeling uncomfortable? When I younger, courtesy of my flammable reactivity, I was told: ‘Don’t take things to heart’, ‘Don’t react so much’, ‘Don’t get triggered.’ Clearly, I was meant to rise above such things and not react (or at least not visibly). But even as I learnt to sometimes not always react outwardly, I wasn’t necessarily any less bothered.

Then, over the years, I realised that I wasn’t alone — and moreover, that not everyone’s reactivity would show on the outside, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t still suffer from it.

What ‘personally’ means

Also, a it turns out, what we take personally turns out to cover quite a lot of ground. Sometimes it’s the weather. Rain, for instance, choosing precisely the moment I was meant to do an outside activity. Rude. Of course we know that it’s not personal. But particularly if we’re having a bad day, it’s easy to fall prey…

Read more

They look different for all of us, but the overall profile is always the same: suddenly, we find ourselves in a situation which triggers old, automatic reactive patterns within, and we do ‘what we always do’. Once they’ve lodged themselves in the deeper layers of ‘me’, they prefer to run the whole show without consulting with our conscious mind.

Occasionally, as I’m sure you’re aware, we’ll even spot them mid-performance — which is particularly maddening (but, despite what it feels like, actually a good sign). It’s as if some part of your awareness steps to the side and mutters, Hellooo — again?, or For goodness’ sake, just SAY something!, or, depending on your personal flair, For heaven’s sake, STOP TALKING!

Dodging a pattern vs dissolving it

We may try the usual tricks: bite our tongue, count to ten, or even deploy that clever communication tool we once heard about on a pod-cast. And sometimes this works in the moment. But it doesn’t touch the pattern itself; we just managed to sidestep

Read more