Our Stress and Survival Responses – which release cortisol and endorphins into our system – are designed to mask pain and even create a feeling of euphoria, so we can escape an immediate attack. They were meant to help us survive, but not to live. But we’re living now under attack. We’ve become addicted to stress on a chemical level, and we put it in everything we do – our work, our exercise, even our health and healing practices.

This isn’t a sustainable strategy for performance. It’s producing nearly every health problem that Western medicine struggles with today: obesity and digestive disorders, weakened immunity and chronic pain, depression and anxiety, even diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s. And it greatly limits our potential. We’re the only animal that works harder than needed to accomplish even simple things. It depletes our energy, and makes it impossible to accomplish truly difficult things. So there must be a better way.

Because we know this, we have a choice. We can choose to move in a very different way, that creates a very different life, and a very different world. We can choose to release the stress and tension from our minds, our bodies, and our lives, that inhibits us, and weighs us down in every step we take. By choosing this, we can literally rewire our neurology, our chromosomes, and our gene expression, to perform at a higher level than we ever dreamed possible. By choosing this, we can rewire this world to perform at a higher level than we ever dreamed possible.

The science supports what we’ve suspected. As mind-body medicine pioneer Dr. Deepak Chopra puts it, “We’re not nouns, we’re verbs.” We aren’t fixed beings, stuck where we are, unchangeable. We’re more like a river, not hardwired but softwired. We know that rigidity is both cause and symptom of mental illness. When this rigidity arises even in our self-care practices like yoga – holding and moving with tension in both our minds and bodies – we limit ourselves greatly. We’ve taken the most common symptoms of human neurosis, and put them into our cure. This isn’t a problem with yoga. It’s a human problem. And we have a choice here. We can choose something different.

How we move – with tension or without, with force and aggression or grace and coordination – rewires our neurology and rebalances our microbiome every single day. It can change our gene expression, make our chromosomes healthier, slow aging, and even alter what we pass along to our children. We create our lives, our health, and our world, in this way.

Activating your Relaxation Response. Similar to developmental movement and body patterning systems, DAYA is designed to activate your body’s Relaxation Response – a chemical cascade responsible for overall health, healing, and wellbeing. First by breathing deep, second by matching your breath and body together, and third by learning to move your whole body in harmony with itself – it’s possible to keep your Relaxation Response going, even when things get tough. This is ground-shaking. It’s how you make the impossible possible, in everything you do.

Our mindset is important here. If we believe that our best way to get where we want to go is by pushing and struggling – and that feeling good is for vacation – this creates a cascade of behaviors and associated chemistry that supports some temporary ability, but leads to declining performance. By contrast, if we believe our best way to get where we want is by feeling good every step along the way – this creates something quite different. We’re able to release stress and tension, approach challenge in an easygoing way, and create an internal chemistry that’s optimal for sustained health and performance.

Imagine if we aimed our attention narrowly and forcefully at accomplishing goals — for example in dancing, jumping and pushing movement. Right away, our body is bathed in stress hormones, including cortisol. We are chemically less able to see the full range of options available to us, and are disconnected from how we feel. We become less creative, and less intuitive. We’re ready to survive an attacking tiger, but that’s about it. Keep pushing this way, and we’re likely to gain more weight than we need, injure our bodies, and suffer from a variety of stress-related disorders.

By contrast, when we move with ease through all conditions, we’re able to trigger and maintain our body’s Relaxation Response. This is where we want to live most of our lives. The good news is, we can activate our own Relaxation Response response by breathing deep, moving gently, and exploring where we are, rather than forcing to be somewhere else. We get happy, creative and intuitive. Which feels amazing.

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