This is an episode I recorded for moms, but in reality it applies to anyone experiencing some form of burnout. We are all insanely busy, it’s just the nature of our modern world. That can make it feel impossible to do your yoga ritual or fit self care into your day. Today I want to show you exactly how you can sprinkle some yoga “glitter” on those everyday moments. Yes, even the moments when you want to scream and throw things at the wall! You’ll find out:

🔹 Why you need a pleasure practice
🔹 How to fit in your yoga ritual even when in “mom mode”
🔹 How to take yoga, meditation, & mindfulness on-the-go
🔹 Sensory practices to help you regulate in challenging moments

Get ready to start living your yoga!!

💃 Join me for a FREE Kundalini Dance Party
https://www.brettlarkin.com/dance

FREE Practice:
5 Min Kundalini Yoga | KUNDALINI YOGA FOR SELF CARE AND ENERGY

Relevant Blog:
4 Modern Ways to Deepen Your Svadhyaya (Self Study) Practice

Relevant to Today’s Episode:
📖 Yoga Life Book
🐍 Yoga for Self Mastery
💖 Uplifted Membership

Instagram: @larkinyogatv

🎧 Also Listen to:
#293 Model Yoga in Your Family with Sophie Jaffe
#307 High School Teacher to Yoga Instructor & Life Coach with Ashlie Franey

Transcript

Brett:
Hello, my friends. Welcome back to the show. Today I am sharing a talk that I put together for moms who are experiencing burnout. But even if you’re not a mom, I think anyone experiencing burnout will really be able to relate to this episode. Although I do mention a lot of things about caring for kids and small children, but at the crux of this episode, I’m talking about self care and how to fit in self care.

even if you are extremely busy. And self care, as you might know, is one of the principal tenants of my Yoga for Self Mastery program, which is all about how to embody the yoga that you love. Like how do you actually live a yogic life in terms of your marriage or your partnership or your desire to be in partnership or how you’re speaking to your children, your boss, your parents.

Yours for that program are closing soon. It ships with a beautiful transformation workbook journal that you get to fill out at home in conjunction with the around 30 hours of videos that you get to watch. And then we actually have live calls that we’re gonna do as well. So you can come together in community to get coaching on whatever you feel stuck with this summer. So if you have not checked out Yoga for Self Mastery, this is a wonderful time. It’s really been the…

In some ways, I want to say it’s like the most important course in the uplifted yoga arsenal, even though I have so many trainings and certifications, because this is the one that’s talking about like, how do you deal with a non -yogi family member? What do you do when you’re irritated and want to scream and yell and throw stuff at the wall, feeling so resentful or so frustrated that you’re still speaking to yourself in a negative way or having, you know, self -sabotaging thoughts.

So, this is very much yoga meets life coaching. So check it out on my website, brettlarkin.com and you can find it. Yoga for Self Mastery will also link it up in the description box below. And without further ado, let’s get into today’s episode.

So today we’re going to break down some strategies about how you can incorporate yoga and meditation into your life, even if you have very little time to practice or very little time for your own self care. And there’s two different branches to this. One, we can talk about…

how powerful it is to create some kind of personal ritual or practice. So I’ll talk about that as a first step. But then as a second step, we’ll talk about what I call yoga habits, which are what I call the yoga glitter that you can sprinkle throughout your whole day. So this is stuff that you can do on the go, even while you’re doing other activities like changing a diaper, for example, or doing the dishes. So I really like this two pronged approach because we’re going to say, all right, listen, if we can set up.

A personal practice for you, that’s our goal. Like if you can have some time for nourishment, that’s what we want. However, if that can’t happen, it’s not like we’re throwing self care and our yoga and meditation out the window. Instead, what we’re going to be doing is just taking yoga on the go and incorporating it into all the other things we’re doing anyway. So in terms of setting up a personal practice, I love 20 minutes and

My book, Yoga Life, actually shows you how to craft a personalized 20-minute practice. So there’s quizzes in this book that lead you to the exact right breath work and poses that you should be doing in the right order for your personality or mind-body type. But then the last section of the book says, okay, you don’t have 20 minutes to practice. Here’s how you’d kind of deconstruct this ritual and make it a five-minute ritual or make it a 10-minute ritual or make it a much more easeful ritual if you happen to be sick.

or you have a baby teething or whatever it might be, or you just didn’t sleep well because you’re in a new place or jet-lagged. So it’s kind of like we have a plan and then we have a lot of wisdom and knowledge and a toolkit about how to deviate from the plan, but also make your yoga practice something that nourishes you. So I think that’s tip number one is that if you can get a yoga mat in your house, you can get some time to practice that.

You want to be doing things that are nourishing, especially if you are a caretaker of others, which I imagine many of you listening or watching this are, right? There’s different seasons in our life. And I know when I, before I had children, for example, I was very interested in kind of pushing what my physical capacity was or, you know, exploring more advanced.

poses to kind of meet myself at a new personal edge. And in the new season of life I’m in where I’m very much a caretaker and the beating heart for my whole family, kind of the glue that’s holding us all together, which requires having a lot of compassion, a lot of love for them and myself. I need a pleasure practice. So making your yoga practice feel like a safe space. So even visualizing your mat if you have one is kind of like a life raft.

And even if all you do is go there and lie down or put your hands on your body and breathe for a couple of minutes, that that’s enough, that yoga is not another thing to do that you have to like check off this imaginary to-do list, but that it’s actually a refuge. It’s a place where we come to slow down and connect with ourselves. And the irony in this is when you start reframing your yoga practice this way is that you begin to crave it.

It becomes something that you want to do because you are doing things that feel pleasurable. So one of the things I talk about in my book is finding what I call your soulmate yoga postures. And these are the poses that usher you into a deeper breath state and a nervous system state of like calm, faster and more efficiently than other poses.

So if you only have a limited time to practice, you want to prioritize those poses that usher you into a state of calm, the fastest and the most efficiently. So for me, some of those poses are cat cow. Many of you may have heard or seen that pose. Obviously. I also love thread the needle, Sufi grind. And I want to talk now a little bit about the practice space itself and my original approach to.

Being a mom or being someone who works or someone who’s burnt out and taking care of a lot of other people and trying to fit the personal practice in was to get up earlier than everyone else and do my practice before everyone woke up. But as I had more children, what I realized was that wasn’t quite working anymore. A, because I needed my sleep.

and B, because my little ones would often get up as well. So then, you know, that time that was supposed to be sort of my solitude time actually, you know, became time when I was just then engaging with them even earlier when than I would have been normally. And while there’s nothing wrong with that, it wasn’t exactly what I was craving. So if you can swing the getting up earlier, I think that is such a powerful thing to do. And it really,

sets the tone for your entire day when you can fit it in first like that while your family’s still asleep or while people are not up yet. And of course, if you have older kids or depending on your situation, you could set boundaries and say, you know, until your light goes off or until a certain time, you know, mommy needs, it needs to be alone in this room or need some space. Um, but I know for me, like, I, I just am very aware of what’s going on in my house. And if someone’s up, I’m not able to relax quite as much.

So an alternate option is to actually just do your ritual, even if it’s just 10 minutes of stretching or whatever it is, in front of your kids and just let them see it. And there’s a great episode about this on the Uplifted Yoga podcast where I talked to my friend, Sophie, and she really reframed. I realized in talking to her that a lot of what I was doing was kind of taking my self-care practice and having it be…

something that I did when I wasn’t in mom mode. So it’s like I was in mom mode and I was taking care of everyone else, or I would like hide and have this secret life in my bedroom or elsewhere, where I would take care of myself doing breath work, meditation, yoga nidra, which is like a form of deep yogic sleep. It’s like a yogic nap. Lots of them on my Uplifted Yoga app. So you can just, you know, I do those a ton. I think they’re great for people who are burnt out or busy parents.

or healthcare workers or teachers because it’s just a nap essentially, but with a rotation of awareness and there’s a lot of history behind it which makes it really deeply healing. But anyway, so I was living this double life where I would like basically hide away to do my self-care practices. And what I realized is that this was in some ways a disservice because it was creating this.

binary thing of like being in mom mode, taking care of others and abandoning myself or, you know, abandoning everyone else and taking care of me. So it’s just kind of a very polarizing framework. Um, and there’s nothing wrong with it. Sometimes we do need to isolate and take care of ourselves, but when we don’t have that option, uh, or the waking up earlier before everyone else wasn’t working, I was like, you know what, let me just let my kids see my practice. And this is what Sophie and I talk about is she said that.

You know, we need to model for our kids what self-care looks like. And if we’re constantly hiding away to do our self-care, they don’t get to see that. And we do have this tendency to make the world revolve around our kids. And sometimes that is necessary, but I started experimenting more with, well, what’s it like to say, mommy’s doing yoga right now, or we’re meditating right now.

or this is what I’m doing, you’re welcome to join me, or you can play with your cars. And is it as relaxing as doing it alone? No, right, because they might fight or there’s noises, but you’re still modeling that it’s happening and it’s still better than nothing. And often you might be surprised, like your kids end up joining you for part of it. Or even if you think they’re not paying attention through osmosis, because…

you know, our kids don’t do what we say, they do what we do, how we act. You notice that they, you know, tell their sibling like, oh, let’s take a deep breath together later in a moment where you think they’re not looking. So like they’re observing these things. So that was a huge turning point for me and a tip that I wanted to share, which is that, yes, try to get a solo time to practice, even if it’s just 10 minutes or

One of my uplifted members and yoga teacher training alumni who also has a great podcast episode on the uplifted yoga podcast, Ashley Franey, she talks about how she just sits up in bed and puts her hands, hands on her body, or she does a little meditation, just sitting up in bed before she brushes her teeth or before she does anything. And that’s her practice. Like it doesn’t even involve a mat. So you can get really creative about what some solo self-care looks like for you, but also.

knowing that you can actually role model this in front of your kids. And I think I talked about it in one of those episodes, like pulling in, I think I drove them to a park or something, and then actually saying, you know, they’re excited to get out of the car and go to the park. And I said, you know what, mommy’s overwhelmed right now. I need to sit in the front seat right now and just do some breathing for a little bit until I feel calm enough and my body feels calm enough to be able to go enjoy the park. And then they just had to sit and wait while I did some breathing.

And they kind of did it with me. They kind of chatted, they kind of did their own thing, but there’s a very powerful moment of role modeling nervous system regulation. So that’s a little bit on the piece of setting up your own ritual or space. And again, I’d really recommend the yoga life book for like what poses to be doing, what breath work to be doing. It makes it incredibly easy. Less is more. Um, you do not need a lot of time. You do not need.

complicated or fancy poses, pretty much everything in the book and that I like to teach as part of like a regular personal self-care practice involving yoga and breath work. I’ve tested on my video game playing pizza eating husband. Like he can do it. You don’t need flexibility. You don’t need tons of strength. These are regulation techniques for the nervous system. But let’s talk a little bit now about

how you can take kind of yoga and breath work and meditation and mindfulness on the go and to actually use the chaos of day-to-day life as an opportunity to anchor in. So a couple techniques that I can teach here that are beyond the scope of my book and maybe beyond things that I’ve talked about before is one technique is just using

Your auditory ability. So this would mean that in a challenging moment, maybe children are fighting, maybe there’s tension at the dinner table, maybe you’re just feeling burnt out, that you just draw all your awareness to your ears and the sounds that you’re hearing around you. And just noticing, like, oh, I hear the hum of the dryer.

Oh, I hear the beating of my heart. Oh, I hear the kids bickering right in front of me. Oh, I hear the crinkling of something kind of lightly cooking in the oven. And you’re still in front of everyone and everything’s still going on around you. But this heightened sense or just drawing extra sensory awareness to listening to sounds.

I invite you to practice it. You can practice it right now if you want. Can give us a moment.

just noticing what do you hear? What do you hear around you in your environment?

Anytime I do a technique, any technique, really, I like to put my hands on my body somewhere. So you could place both hands on your thighs or one hand on your belly and one hand on your chest, assuming you’re not driving. But just what do you hear? I hear, I think, some freeway noise.

Other than that, my house is very quiet right now, just begin to notice your breath. And I’m blinking my eyes open now, but what I invite you to observe is that even if you do this in a very chaotic moment, it helps you slow down. It helps you gain an awareness and perspective and kind of distances you from a moment that might feel overwhelming. And so it’s just remembering to take that pause and then remembering to observe your breath and get really interested in sound.

A similar technique, if you didn’t love that one, would be, and again, you could do this while you’re potentially changing a diaper or again, sitting or feeding a child is just to draw your awareness to everywhere in your body that’s touching. So if you’re not speaking, your lips are touching. If your soles of the feet happen to be on the ground,

They’re touching. I happen to be sitting cross-legged as I speak this, but that means my ankles are touching. And I’m going to place my hands now on my thighs, which means there’s a connection point between my hands and my thighs that are touching. Each time I blink, my eyelids are touching. So let’s try that now, just for a couple breaths. And you can do this even if you’re driving, honestly. Maybe your inner thighs are slightly touching.

But where?

So you have skin meeting skin, maybe lips meeting lips, upper and lower lip.

Can you soften the jaw?

What are your hands touching?

What are your feet touching?

Maybe what is your back touching?

and begin to slow.

and observe the cadence of your inhales and exhales.

and use this as a way to self -soothe.

Maybe you notice the breath inflating and getting a little bit bigger around the heart or around the chest.

pause and blink your eyes open if they were closed, I’m opening mine, but just see what you notice. So when we focus on what’s touching either within our own body or maybe what’s in contact with the surface around us, the chair behind us, the floor beneath us, that’s also extremely grounding. And I’ve done this while spoon-feeding a child. Like you can multitask and do these things.

Right? So I’m spoon feeding, you know, a toddler and I’m thinking about where my inner thighs are touching, where my feet are touching the ground, how my lips are touching. And I’m still able to engage with him and maybe what he’s needing. But I’m also having a profound awareness of my internal experience. And we are energetic beings. So your kids or the people around you do respond differently.

mirror neurons are real. So when they sense you calming down and slowing down and regulating, it might not happen instantaneously, but their nervous systems are going to do the same.

So if you’re in the season of parenting young kids or a season of intense work or burnout and not having time for yourself or time to practice, the new mantra is instead of having some sort of long fancy yoga practice would just be short moments many times. Short moments of introspection, pause.

noticing touch or noticing sound many, many times throughout the day. Doing dishes, right? That’s another place where you can really observe touch and maybe the sensation of the water on the skin and noise, right? All at the same time. So when we anchor or link an activity like…

noticing sound or noticing our body or noticing our breath to an activity that we’re constantly doing anyway, that’s like a chore, like changing diapers or feeding someone else or doing dishes. The practice becomes so seamlessly integrated into the fabric of our life. It almost becomes easy. And I can give a funny story, an example of this from my own life just yesterday. And I think it’s such a…

great example of what it encapsulates what parenthood feels like, I think, for so many of us is I had this beautiful moment putting my kids to bed where my younger son actually noticed a rainbow outside our window. And it was like this magnificent classic rainbow. And I mean, we don’t, it’s pretty special to see a rainbow, especially for it to be right outside our window. And especially for my…

just turned three year old to be the one to notice and point it all out to us. And we had this really beautiful moment all watching it together. And I got my older son in his room. And then I was kind of lying down with my younger son and he put his head on my chest and it was just so beautiful. And he vomited everywhere. It’s like sheets dirty, headboard dirty. And then I made the mistake of trying to move him for the second round of vomit. I guess I was thinking we would get to the bathroom in time. We did not. So then he, you know, carpet.

you know, all the things. But it was really interesting because I was actually reading a book about mindfulness as he was kind of lying on my chest. And so because I was literally reading about a lot of these mindfulness techniques as this then happened.

I was able to navigate it, I think, really beautifully. Like before, I would be like, oh my gosh, why is this happening? Like, this is a nightmare. Kind of going into that victim mode, like the amount of laundry I have to do, the amount of carpet cleaning now I have to do, you know, spiraling. And instead, I was just like, this is happening. I’m blessed I have a laundry machine, right? This isn’t the first time I’m going to clean up vomit. It’s not going to be the last.

And I just didn’t really make it mean much of anything. And I was just in my body and present with myself. And the hardest part was dealing with my husband who was quite irritated. Right. So it’s that’s the practice. The practice isn’t something that’s isolated to a 10 minute morning ritual. If you’re lucky enough to get that right. It’s really like.

How regulated am I when things don’t go according to plan and how can I model that for my kids and stay in love or let that be the guiding force and dissolve, which I think is what we open talking about this binary of like I’m in servant mode and abandoning myself, taking care of someone else, or I’m abandoning other people while I sneak and run away to take care of myself, which again, we can do sometimes.

But kind of opening up to this new paradigm of like, how can I just be constantly nourishing myself and constantly filling myself up with what the yogis call Purana, right? Breath. And linking this into the daily mundane, boring activities of diapers or dishwashing or whatever it happens to be that are happening anyway.

So I hope you leave with some gold nuggets and this gives you some things to think about. If you are looking for like a quick 10-minute little routine that you could do on your own, I would love to gift you my free Kundalini dance party. This is a really fun special class because I scored it to my own original music and Kundalini is a style of yoga that really raises energy. And this particular class is just about having fun and feeling into the whole body really quickly.

So I love this class for everyone, but moms in particularly, you don’t need to have any Kundalini yoga experience to do it. It’s really simple stuff. But just because we get to dance, we get to be playful. If you did want to put this video on even with your kids or in front of your kids, I think they would also have a lot of fun with it because we shake, but it’s a very powerful way to transform your whole mood in less than 10 minutes by doing this kind of fun Kundalini yoga workout with music. So the link to get that will be in the description box.

Thank you so much for being with me and from my heart to yours. Namaste.