I discovered my favorite mindfulness hack completely by accident

Sometimes the most difficult things in life are also the most necessary. That thing in front of me somehow made it to my yoga mat on a recent weekday afternoon.

Turning to a yoga practice on YouTube was my favorite method to slow down. I quickly scrolled through the overwhelming number of options for “slow” and “gentle” yoga practices, a task that was almost enough to keep me from taking a break. ‘I can rest later,’ I thought. But I knew better. Later usually turns into late night, which turns into morning, which easily turns into never.

So I got a chill by default Yoga for the lower back practice by my go-to, Yoga with Adriene. I moved the first few stretches as directed: knees to chest and seated Cat-Cow. But Low Lunge made me more or less lose all motivation to move my body. So I gave myself what I actually needed: an excuse to lie down in the middle of the day, under the guise of practicing yoga.

While there was no chance I was going to leave my comfortable spot and end up in Rag Doll, many of the cues still applied to me in my pseudo-Savasana. “Breathe deeply and then let it all out,” Adriene suggested. So I did. “Listen to your body.” Bill. While Adriene was encouraging all this body awareness, I became aware of my own feet: I was cold. I pulled a blanket over myself and from my comfortable cocoon let the rest of the video wash over me, following the cues I wanted and letting the rest dissolve into the air.

At first, there was a feeling of guilt in the pit of my stomach, as if I had let myself and Adriene down by playing the video and not moving my body as directed. But I realized that the video was just a tool: a container that gave me permission to pause, no matter what I wanted to do within that pause.

A Slack ping was the work-from-home version of a singing bowl, bringing me out of my dormant state and back into life mode. Before I took a moment to pause the end of the yoga video or close the app, I hopped on my computer to respond to the message. Another yoga video started playing while I was typing my message, but I wasn’t paying much attention. I was back in work mode, answering emails and jotting down tasks as they came to me. “I really need to turn that off,” I thought when I heard Adriene shout the Sun Salutation in another video. But then I heard her say, “Relax your shoulders,” and without even thinking about it, I pulled my shoulders away from my ears halfway through my keyboard stroke.

A few seconds later, Adriene gave the signal, “Breathe into your belly,” and again my body responded. I loosened up my spine, slowed my usually uncomfortably fast typing pace a bit, and was reassured that “I was enough” and that I didn’t need to push myself so much.

So I let autoplay do its work. The yoga videos kept playing. I kept working.

Listening to yoga videos while sitting at my desk felt incongruous in some ways. Work Laura’s measure of success is how much she can accomplish while consuming so much caffeine that her body could be studied by future generations. The goal of Yoga Laura is to separate identity from career and productivity from self-esteem. Bringing these two sides of me together was terrifying, like when you host a dinner party with friends from completely different stages of your life. But it was also a relief, like when those two friends get along and you think, “I should have done this sooner!”

Since then, playing yoga videos while working has made me more aware of how my body sits in the chair and how long my eyes spend looking at the screen without looking away. But it has also brought balance to vastly different aspects of my personality and how they play out in real time. When I get overwhelmed with everything I have to do in a given week, I hear Adriene: Birdor Cassandra thinking of ways to slow down. Likewise, when I’m excited about something I’m accomplishing, I hear one of the yoga teachers in the background drawing my attention to a part of my body that I would otherwise neglect. It’s soothing and grounding in a way that I suspected was lacking in my work, though I didn’t necessarily know how to fix it.

The endless stream of different soundtracks, teachers and vibrations makes me feel like I have an active support system taking care of me, governing me and calming me down.

I also started playing yoga videos outside of work hours. On the weekends, when I want to get a lot done (laundry, creative projects, hanging out with friends), I play a yoga video and make sure autoplay is on. The playlist reminds me that I’m not alone, and it grounds me in the same warm and irrepressibly good way that I get from going to yoga class, without having to go anywhere or do anything.