But weirdly, my favorite thing about this class was that the instructor, Jennifer, never shut up.
If we were doing a thigh stretch, Jennifer said I should imagine my breath as a golden light zooming out of the top of my head during my inhale and back into my thigh as I exhaled. If I was flexing my toes, I should envision my feet as plants, sending roots all the way down into the earth. She kept reminding us over and over to think intensely about the body part we were stretching. She would name each individual muscle and force us to focus in on the sensation of it pulling in our body. She had me imagine that I had nostrils on my butt, and that I was breathing out of them. The fact that she never stopped talking meant that my brain never really got the chance to wander.
The stretches were just intense enough to force me to pay close attention to the (satisfying) pain in my body. And the visualizations forced me to keep my attention on my legs. It wasn’t like PE, where we counted to twenty for each stretch. Instead, we sat in these positions for a few minutes each. I had never in my life spent five full minutes thinking so intensely about every sensation within my toes, or my shoulders, or my calves.
After thirty minutes of yin yoga stretching came the restorative yoga part. Jennifer told us to arrange our pillows into a structural mound. I prepared myself for some new physical test, but she said, “Now lie down on the pillows with your knees open and your arms to your sides.” Restorative yoga, as it turned out, was just lying down in different comfy-cozy positions with a warm blanket on top of you. “If you want another blanket, just raise your hand and I will come around and tuck you in,” she called out, padding gently around the room. She asked us to close our eyes and gave us more visualizations: We were instructed to envision that someone was slowly pouring a giant carafe of golden oil all over our bodies or that a light was building in our bellies and coming out of the crown of our heads, radiating warmth and goodness into the world. If you’d approached me before class and asked me to try these thought experiments, I would have felt too silly to commit to them fully. But now I embraced them and let that light expand in my belly like a pure globe of euphoria.
I understood the purpose of the first half of the class now. While we were stretching, the instructor had been training us to pay close attention to tiny sensations in our bodies. And now that we were relaxing on a mountain of pillows, those sensations were exquisite. My favorite position was something called a “heart opener,” in which I lay on my back with a pillow under my spine so my arms hung limp on each side of me, my chest spread wide. The feeling of perfect cool air flowing over my open palms transported me to a meadow on a spring day. The feeling of my chest stretching wide made me feel courageous and whole. My back felt devoid of pain, my waist felt heavy and warm underneath the heavy blanket. Even my breath felt fresh and clean coming in and out of my body. And most importantly, there were no annoying voices. I wasn’t thinking about the past, or various insecurities, or the future.
The term “grounded” started making sense. Being utterly and completely present allowed me to focus on the immense, full-body pleasure of simply being alive. I was surprised to find tears streaming off the sides of my face. This pleasure—as intense as staring into the sun—didn’t have to cost anything. It was available to me anytime. I was overwhelmed by my discovery of a rapturous new drug that also happened to be free and legal and noncaloric!
But at the same time, I was crying because a small part of me was sad: How had I not known, until this moment, the pleasure of breathing? How had I not known that feeling air on my palms could be so comforting? How much pleasure had I missed because I was too in my head to pay attention? How often had I longed to leave all of this, to die, because I hadn’t understood how satisfying it could be?
The tears started flowing even harder. Swaddled in a blanket, feeling utterly safe and comfortable, I felt…cradled. As if someone was taking care of me, flooding me with kindness and generosity and love. And I was that someone.
* * *
—
Months later, I learned that what happened that first day at restorative yoga hadn’t been entirely spiritual—I hadn’t just found the exact spot on the astral plane to tap into my sacred core. Instead, my instructor’s techniques happened to be the perfect mechanism to turn down my DMN.
The default mode network is so called because if you put people into an MRI machine for an hour and let their minds wander, the DMN is the system of connections in their brains that will light up. It’s arguably the default state of human consciousness, of boredom and daydreaming. In essence, our ego.
So if you’re stuck in a machine for an hour, where does your mind go? If you’re like most people, you’ll ruminate on the past or plan your future. You might think about your relationships, upcoming errands, your zits. And scientists have found that some people who suffer from depression, anxiety, or C-PTSD have overactive DMNs.
Which makes sense. The DMN is the seat of responsibility and insecurity. It can be a punishing force when it over-ruminates and gets caught in a toxic loop of obsession and self-doubt.
The DMN can be silenced significantly by antidepressants or hallucinogenic substances. But the most efficient cure for an overactive DMN is mindfulness.
Here’s how it works: In order for the DMN to start whirring, it needs resources to fuel its internal focus. If you’re intently focused on something external—like, say, filling out a difficult math worksheet—the brain simply doesn’t have the resources to focus internally and externally at the same time. So if you’re triggered, you can short-circuit an overactive DMN by cutting off its power source—shifting all of your brain’s energy to external stimuli instead.
Of course, doing difficult math while triggered is not going to be easy—though I’d done some version of that for years, using work as a DMN-silencer. Other people use alcohol. Or drugs. A potentially easier and healthier external task? Focusing on the five senses.