reset from within: 3 practices for your nervous system, vagus nerve, and lymph flow
“Having your whole body aware that there’s a ground underneath you — that’s where healing begins.”
When stress, tension, or overwhelm take hold, we don’t need to do more. We need to tune in. Somatic yoga offers a gentle, embodied way to reconnect with your body and restore natural rhythms including nervous system regulation, vagus nerve health, and lymphatic flow.
In our Somatic Yoga Series: Stimulate the Vagus + Clear the Lymph, each session integrates simple, science-informed practices to help you downshift from stress and support whole-body healing. These three practices are a great place to begin.
1. Grounding Breath & Shoulder Release
Support your vagus nerve by releasing upper-body tension
The vagus nerve travels through the neck, chest, and diaphragm. When tension builds in these areas, your nervous system can’t easily shift into rest mode. This short practice begins with breath awareness and progresses into shoulder rolls, arm circles, and chest-opening movements.
You'll activate vagal tone by freeing tension in the upper body, opening space for your breath, and creating the conditions for your nervous system to relax.
This practice is ideal if you:
Feel tension in your neck, shoulders, or jaw
Want to create calm through breath and gentle movement
Are seeking an easy reset after screen time or emotional stress
2. Travel-Friendly Circulation Booster
Gentle movement to stimulate lymph flow and regulate energy
Even if you’re short on time or space, this movement sequence boosts circulation and lymphatic drainage. By mimicking a walking motion with rhythmic arm swings and breath awareness, you create a gentle pump effect in your upper body, especially around the armpits, which are home to major lymph nodes.
Add in walking in place, and this becomes a full-body circulatory flush you can do in a hallway, hotel room, or even standing at your desk.
Perfect for:
Encouraging lymphatic drainage while traveling or sitting for long periods
Shifting from sluggishness to clarity
Reconnecting breath with rhythm and flow
Bonus: It pairs beautifully with three-part breath + humming, extending your exhale to calm your vagus nerve and anchor your attention inward.
“Let yourself be moved. This is a ripple of relief from the inside out.”
3. Full-Body Ripple: A 9-Minute Somatic Flow
Move like water to circulate lymph, loosen fascia, and reset your system
This 9-minute practice brings it all together: lymphatic circulation, vagus nerve stimulation, and somatic awareness. Starting with wave-like swaying from side to side, loosening the joints and inviting your fascia to release. From there, you’ll explore pelvic circles in both directions, building from the feet through the spine to create fluid, whole-body spirals.
In the final phase, you'll experiment with rippling movement through the spine, encouraging organic expression and integration of everything you’ve activated. The sequence concludes with gentle shaking, a forward fold, and optional downward dog or child’s pose to help the flow return to center.
This practice:
Enhances lymphatic flow and clears stagnation
Mobilizes the spine, hips, and fascia
Deeply supports nervous system regulation through rhythm and self-expression
Why These Somatic Practices Matter
True healing doesn’t happen through force, it happens through feeling.
When we slow down and tune into the body, we create the space for lasting change. The lymphatic system and vagus nerve don’t respond to intensity or willpower. They respond to gentle movement, steady breath, and a felt sense of safety. These systems are quiet, subtle, and deeply intelligent — and they thrive when we meet them with patience and presence.
The vagus nerve is a key part of your body’s parasympathetic “rest and digest” response. It helps regulate your heart rate, digestion, mood, and immune function. But it doesn’t activate just because you want to relax. It activates when your body senses that it’s safe enough to soften, and that sensing happens through somatic experience, not mental effort.
Likewise, the lymphatic system relies on gentle rhythmic movement to function. It has no pump of its own, so it depends on muscle contraction, breath, and gravity to circulate lymph, your body’s internal cleansing fluid. Without movement, lymph stagnates, inflammation builds, and the body struggles to detoxify. But with the right kind of movement — slow, wave-like, mindful — it begins to flow again.
These somatic yoga practices are designed to do just that:
Invite circulation and lymphatic flow
Stimulate the vagus nerve through diaphragmatic breathing and gentle touch
Reduce tension and inflammation in the tissues
Create the inner conditions for calm, clarity, and connection
When we move with intention, not to perform, but to listen, we reestablish trust within our own bodies. We come back into rhythm with ourselves. And from this rhythm, we regain access to energy, emotional steadiness, and the ability to respond to life with more grace.
Each of these practices offers a powerful yet accessible way to regulate your energy, release stuckness, and reconnect with your body’s natural capacity to heal, from the inside out.
loved this practice and ready to go deeper?
NEW! Somatic Yoga Series:
Stimulate Your Vagus, Clear Your Lymph
This workshop-style practice series offers 9.5 CEUs for yoga teachers and therapists.
Each week, you'll explore vagus-activating and lymph-clearing practices designed to support a balanced nervous system, enhance resilience, and optimize your body’s natural healing systems.
We’ll begin the series with a mini-workshop diving into the science behind the nervous system and lymphatic system, and wrap up with a mini-retreat to help integrate and embody all you've learned.
Join us through membership (it’s included!) or full-series registration.