You walk into a class. Sometimes it feels easy to follow. Sometimes it doesn’t. The pace feels too fast. Or strangely slow. You can’t quite name why — but something in your body resists, or disconnects. What if the reason is not motivation, or fitness, or mood… but rhythm? And more specifically, your own breathing rhythm. This is why I begin every class with breath. Not as a technique — but as a way to listen. Before we move, we sense. Before we align, we notice. And from there, something subtle happens: a group of different bodies, each with its own rhythm, begins to find a shared one. Photo by Hoi An and Da Nang Photographer on Unsplash The Body Is a System of Rhythms In my last article, I wrote that the body and brain have inherent rhythms — and that these rhythms are not random, but connected in stable proportions. In this article, I want to make this more concrete. We’ll look at three systems: the heart, the lungs, and the brain —and how their rhythms constantly influence each oth

In a recent session, I noticed something fascinating: in a 1:1 class, my client’s breathing and movements were naturally slower than mine. I adjusted to her rhythm to help her feel aligned and comfortable. Then, when I moved into a group class right after, the same pace suddenly felt too slow — the group’s energy and breathing were faster. Experiences like this remind me of how individual our rhythms are, and how much they shape how we move, perceive, and feel. Every one of us has a slightly different tempo — in breath, heartbeat, and even brain activity — and tuning into that rhythm changes how we experience our bodies and our minds. How brain rhythms are made Each of our neurons fires a tiny spark of electricity. When many neurons fire together, pause, and fire again, they create a rhythm, or oscillation. If they spike ten times per second, we say that the rhythm is 10 Hz (see picture). Here’s the mind blowing part: everyone’s rhythms are slightly different. At rest, your brain has a

We like to think language happens entirely in the brain. But what if our bodies are doing half the work? I remember the first time I realized this. I was a master’s student at an international neuroscience conference, sitting in a lecture hall when a speaker explained that understanding language doesn’t rely only on traditional language areas in the brain — it also recruits regions responsible for movement, sensation, and emotion. At first, I was mind-blown. And then, a few seconds later, I had a different reaction: Of course. Think about how we speak. When we describe something as big, our hands spread apart. When we say something happened quickly, our arms move fast. For years I assumed these gestures were only helping the person listening to understand me. What I learned that day was that they were also helping me think. The brain does language embodied In neuroscience this idea is called embodied language processing. It means that understanding language is not confined to a small “

I Studied the Brain and Almost Forgot I Had a Body. For most of my adult life, I lived in my head. I trained as a cognitive neuroscientist. I spent years studying language, prediction, how the brain constructs reality. I loved the precision of it — the clean questions, the elegant models, the quiet authority of data. I enjoyed my PhD. My curiosity had finally found a place where it felt at home. But only in the mind. On paper, everything made sense. Publications. Ivy League. Prestigious fellowship. A future mapped in citations and conference talks. And yet, slowly, something inside me began to crack. My knee snapped one day while I was cycling uphill in London. I remember stopping at a traffic light, waiting for it to turn green. I was eager — anxious not to be late for an appointment to see a new rental apartment. When the light shifted, I immediately pushed hard on the pedals. And then I heard it. A sharp, internal crack. Not loud to the world — but unmistakable to my body. I stopped