Training the Nervous System Is the Real Yoga

Regulation, Heartmind, and Undistorted Awareness

At Burning Wheel Yoga School, we use physical intensity for a specific purpose.
Not to overwhelm the system, but to reveal it.

Under load, patterns surface immediately. Breath shortens or steadies. Attention scatters or stabilizes. The nervous system doesn’t lie. It shows its habits clearly when the pressure is on. This is where yoga stops being theoretical and becomes lived.

What Regulation Looks Like in Practice

Imagine you’ve moved through integration, Sun A’s, and Sun B’s. The room is hot. You’re sweaty. Your heart rate is elevated. It’s not all that different from a stressful conversation or an anxious moment when you pause and notice what’s happening in your body.

Now the sequence shifts to hips and twists, and the intensity turns up another notch.

You fight your way through the first twist without breathing enough. When you open into Warrior II, your jaw drops open. Your eyes roll back or close. You start panting. Your heart rate spikes. By the time you move through side angle and into triangle, you’re hanging in your joints, checked out. You’ve technically been moving, but you haven’t been present for ten minutes.

That’s dysregulation.

Same sequence. Different choices.

You breathe steadily through the first twist. When you open to Warrior II, you focus your gaze. You bring attention inward and feel your body. You close your mouth and control your breath through your nose, keeping it slow and full. The heart rate stays manageable. You’re in your muscles. You’re in alignment. You’re present for side angle. You’re present for triangle.

This is how nervous system regulation is trained.

Under real load, you don’t check out.
You check in.

The Principle of Order

A few years ago, when I started to see through the cracks of my marriage, I didn’t yet have language for what was happening internally.

When I went through my divorce, my ex-wife moved out with our daughter, and I stayed behind in an apartment in my parents’ basement. I had lived in that space through multiple phases of my life. Before marriage. After home ownership. And now, after divorce.

I didn’t want to live surrounded by ghosts.

I told her to take anything she wanted and leave behind whatever she couldn’t use. Then I cleaned everything. Floor to ceiling. Years of clutter gone. I saged the space. I ran the Roomba every day until it stopped pulling up cat hair. I reclaimed the apartment, not symbolically, but physically.

As the space was organized, something else did too.

As the space came into order, my breath steadied, and my nervous system settled. A sense of agency returned. I wasn’t fixing my life. I was tending to what was immediately in front of me until the space felt like home again and my body knew it.

The same principle applies on the mat.

Regulation precedes insight. Stability creates the conditions for clarity. Without a regulated system, awareness is distorted by reactivity, memory, and anticipation. Physical rigor gives the nervous system something real to organize around.

The Aliveness Within Movement

When awareness stays present inside sensation rather than retreating from it, something shifts. There is a felt aliveness within movement. Not agitation. Not collapse. Presence. Stillness, in this context, doesn’t mean the absence of movement. It means coherence within it.

This is where heartmind healing begins to take shape. Not as a permanent state, and not as something that magically fixes your life, but as a change in how experience is met.

Viktor Frankl described it this way: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Practice trains you to feel that space.

At first, it’s barely noticeable. A moment. A pause. Over time, that pause lengthens. Awareness learns to stay present instead of collapsing into habit. What does not change automatically is what you do inside that space. Habitual patterns don’t disappear. They still arise. The difference is that they no longer own you.

You have a moment to breathe. Sometimes that breath is the only thing you manage at first. That’s enough. Because that breath is the pause. The pause is the space Frankl described. And inside that space, you get to choose whether the same old response comes out of your mouth, or something new.

Beyond the Mat

This practice is not designed to calm you temporarily. It is designed to train you for life as it actually unfolds. Pressure. Responsibility. Uncertainty. Relationship.

When awareness can stay present inside effort, fulfillment stops being something you chase. It becomes something you inhabit. Not as a concept, but as a lived intelligence moving through your breath, your body, and your choices.

This is the real work of yoga.

Not escaping sensation.
Not transcending life.
But meeting it clearly, with regulation, sincerity, and heart.

And this is why we are here.

Ready to Train Your Nervous System With Personal Guidance?

If this resonates and you want to experience this work in a more focused, individualized way, a private yoga session with Monique offers space to go deeper.

Private sessions are not about perfecting poses. They are about learning how to stay present under load, how to regulate your breath when intensity rises, and how to cultivate steadiness that carries beyond the mat. Whether you are new to yoga, refining an advanced practice, or integrating philosophy into lived experience, Monique will meet you exactly where you are.

 
Book a private yoga session with Monique and begin training in real yoga—regulation, awareness, and choice.