In 1993, Jillian Pransky was walking up Fifth Avenue in Manhattan when a small gold sign advertising a yoga studio caught her eye. A relative novice to yoga, she turned on a whim, went in, and some two hours later, found herself sobbing on her yoga mat. “I knew I was tight from years of sports, but it wasn’t until that moment that I realized that under the tightness I’d lived with from pushing myself around — muscling through everything I encountered without taking a rest — was also a deep, pervasive tension that came from the way I held myself together,” Pransky says. RELATED: The United States of Stress: You’ll Never Think About Stress the Same Way Again Fast forward 25 years, and Pransky, now an acclaimed yoga teacher and yoga therapist, has long since DIY’d a method for recognizing and releasing the tension we store in our bodies — which she likens to living in too tight “inner” clothes — and clearing a path toward calm and self-healing. She calls the constellation of techniques she uses to achieve this “deep listening,” and though she has been teaching the method for years, she has only recently put it together in a book. Everyday Health sat down with Pransky to talk about deep listening as a tool for coping with chronic, toxic stress.
Everyday Health: Could you define what you mean by deep listening?
Jillian Pransky: Deep listening isn’t so much a specific technique as it is an approach to how you receive and respond to yourself — it’s how you listen to your body, breath, feelings, and thoughts. Through this process of showing up and connecting with ourselves, we are able to be more aware of ourselves in relationship to others, our environment, and the conditions around us, so that we are not reacting from a place of stress all the time.
EH: You’re basically talking about a dialogue between body and mind?
JP: Yes. However, most of the time we think about stress as what is going on in our lives or our heads — that’s bothering me, or this is depressing me or stressing me out. We think of stress as a psychological experience. But we need to also realize that it is taking a serious toll on our biological system. Our bodies respond to everything we hear and experience around us, as well as to what we think and experience on the inside.
EH: What’s involved with deep listening?
JP: I created an acronym so that my students would remember it: LARLAR. What I mean by that, the first part of the acronym, is that first you have to “land.” I’m literally referring to the way we feel connected to the ground underneath us. It’s only when we begin to feel support that we can begin to feel safe, and support and safety are prerequisites to being able to relax. Next, we “arrive,” and what I mean by that is become present or aware of what is happening in the moment. Initially we use the breath as a tool to help us arrive, as the breath is only happening in the now moment. Therefore gently paying attention to the flow of the breath helps us to naturally arrive in the present. Placing our awareness on the breath also begins to deepen the breath, which in turn will calm the nervous system. Finally, we “relax” on purpose. There are areas in our body that harbor habitual tension. In this phase, we notice the places we are gripping and clenching and holding — the jaw, the shoulders, the fists, the belly.
EH: And you walk students through this in your class and in your book?
JP: Yes. For instance, in the book and in my workshops, I literally offer tools to help us connect with this physical feeling of being on the ground, being supported using physical tools, like feeling your feet on the earth or letting your body weight drain down. When we literally experience the support, we can stop gripping and clenching and holding ourselves up.
EH: What’s the net result?
JP: When we relax areas of habitual tension, we send a message to the body that we don’t need to be armoring ourselves and defending ourselves from a threat. The nervous system gets the sense that it’s safe, and it puts in motion physiological and neurological responses that allow us to begin the process of moving out of the stress response and into the relaxation response. When you relax and expand your ability to breathe, for instance, it stimulates the vagus nerve, which is the switch to what we call the parasympathetic nervous system (which helps us rest and digest). It sets the conditions, physiologically and neurologically, to tell our entire body that we can calm down.
EH: How do we know if we need to do this?
JP: I have been teaching for 25 year and I teach hundreds of people every year. I have never met a person who doesn’t need to recognize where they need to lose habitual tension. Tension has a psychoneurological component. Every time we don’t feel okay about something, we tense up in our body and it doesn’t release until we feel grounded, slow down, take a deep breath, and soften our body.
EH: Are there some typical areas where we all tend to store physical tension?
JP: There are protective stances, areas habitual to a lot of people. For instance, I just taught a class of 250 people, and so many came up to me afterward and told me that they thought I was talking personally to them when I said relax your squinting muscles, allow your jaw to dangle, and allow your shoulders to drop away from your ears. This happens every time I teach. We all harbor similar tension.
EH: Does it become more individualized from there?
JP: Yes. Once people start recognizing these common areas, they sort of become portals to discovery. We start in those areas and then everyone finds they can let go a little bit and soften a little bit as we move through our body and find old injuries — an old sports injury or a car accident. Or the way we slumped because we didn’t want to be seen because we were taller or smarter than someone else, or not so good at something. The inner tension because of how we felt about a parent or sibling. We discover the ways we hold ourselves together that are personal to us and that have become areas of hardness and solidity, which over time limit our wellness and well-being.
EH: And in the acronym, LARLAR, this is the second LAR?
JP: Yes. The first LAR steps set the foundation for the next three steps of LAR. They create the conditions for us to “listen” inwardly to our bodies, breath, and mind. As we listen in this way, we can begin to discover where we are out of balance or holding tension in our body and mind. We may experience stored sensations, emotions, or thoughts that need to shift in some way. To allow this evolution, we practice “allowing,” or kindly meeting our inner experience so that long-held, often hidden stress and tension can be released. We then “relax” all over again and repeat the process: LARLAR.
EH: How critical to well-being is this kind of practice?
JP: Essential. Disease often starts with dis-ease. In other words, too much time spent in the sympathetic nervous system results in diseases in our bodies, whether it’s hypertension or type 2 diabetes or a litany of digestive disorders. Most people are aware that they feel stressed, but they think it will end if they just slow down and do fewer things. But unless you attend to the tension and stress that has found its home in your body, you’re not going to bring yourself into a state of well-being.
EH: How often are you supposed to practice deep listening to benefit from it?
JP: This isn’t a practice in which you have to change your lifestyle. You don’t need to be on your yoga mat for two hours or sit on a cushion for 20 minutes. There are so many tools that take just a couple of minutes that you can use regularly to land, feel your body, and relax. It can be done upon waking, before a meal, before entering your house after work, before picking up the phone to have a conversation. I set the alarm on my iPhone to alert me every three hours so that I can pause, take three breaths, and release the areas I tense. The main point here is to commit regularly, like the way we brush our teeth, to simple practices that help us to relax more in the daily moments of our lives.
