How to stop reacting and start choosing: a mindfulness yoga practice
Jul 24, 2026
Your phone buzzes mid conversation and your hand is already reaching for it before you have decided anything.
Someone cuts you off in the supermarket carpark and your jaw is tight before you have even registered what happened.
That is unconscious living. Something happens, you react, and it feels like there was no choice in it at all. Stephen Covey talked about a gap that exists between the thing that happens to you and how you respond to it. Most of us are moving so fast that the gap disappears. Stimulus, reaction, done.
This week's class on Yoga to Transform is built around finding that gap again.
The practice: choosing your word
Before we move a single muscle, I ask you to close your eyes and let one word surface. Not a word you think you should pick. A word that actually rises up from underneath everything else, a quality you want to be standing in today. Kindness. Steadiness. Love. Whatever it is.
Then we add two words in front of it. I am.
Saying "I am kind" lands differently to just thinking "kind." You are not describing a mood. You are choosing an identity, on purpose, in this moment, and you get to keep choosing it again every time you notice you have drifted from it. That is the whole practice. Not getting it right the first time. Returning to it the next time.
The flow: hips, thighs and heart
Once the word is anchored, we build the physical practice around it.
We start on our feet, working the four corners of the foundation, the loving hug of muscle to bone, and the lift through the pubic bone to navel that shows up again and again through the class. From there we move through several rounds of a standing flow into forward folds, working the breath and the foundation before the body ever leaves the floor.
The second half opens the hips and thighs properly. Low lunges (Anjaneyasana) on both sides, working into the front hip and the back thigh. A hamstring stretch that asks you to notice which side feels tighter, and to stay curious about that instead of frustrated. A twisted lunge that opens through the chest as much as the hip. Camel pose (Ustrasana), taken as far as your body wants to go today and no further, followed by child's pose to let the nervous system catch up with what the body just did.
We close seated, with Nadi Shodhana, alternate nostril breathing, to settle the mind back into the body before you stand up and walk back into your day.
Why this matters more than the pose itself
The point was never the perfect camel pose. The point is training the pause. Every time you notice a sensation building in a hip opener and you choose to breathe into it instead of bracing against it, you are practising the exact same muscle you need for the supermarket carpark, the buzzing phone, the comment from your mother in law.
You are practising the gap.
Back to your week
That phone will buzz again this week. That moment in the carpark will happen again in some form or another. The difference is whether you meet it on autopilot or whether you meet it having spent an hour on the mat training yourself to pause, breathe, and choose.
This class is on the Yoga to Transform YouTube channel now if you want to move through it with me and Blackie the yoga cat, who, for the record, did very well and did not once try to sit on the mat.
If mindfulness, weight and wellness is a conversation you want more of, the Beyond the Diet podcast goes deeper into this work every week. And if you are in Christchurch and want to practise together, you will find our full class schedule at yogatotransform.com.
If you would like to know more about our services including our courses, workshops, coaching or retreats then click here
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