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Start Again: Come Home To Yourself
30 daagse cursus

Start Again: Come Home To Yourself

Door Mark Mathews

Start dag 1
Wat je zal leren
There are moments in life when you know something needs to change. When the stress you've been carrying feels too heavy. When your mind won't quiet. When you've lost touch with the calm, grounded version of yourself you know exists beneath the noise. This 30-day course is your way back. Start Again isn't about willpower or forcing change. It's a gentle, evidence-based journey that teaches you how to regulate your nervous system, release what no longer serves you, and consciously invite in what you need - calm, clarity, confidence, and hope. Over 30 days, you'll move through three powerful phases: Phase 1: Breathe - Finding Ground (Days 1-10) Master nine proven breathing techniques and choose your personal anchor breath for grounding and calm. Phase 2: Release - Creating Space (Days 11-20) Let go of mental clutter, perfectionism, tension, and other people's expectations through nine guided visualisations and body-based practices, before choosing your anchor for release. Phase 3: Renew - Inviting In (Days 21-30) Invite in fresh energy, self-trust, gratitude, and compassion. Meet your future self and learn to call in the feelings you want to embody and experience how breath, release, and renewal combine into one simple practice. By Day 30, you will have chosen three personal anchors: a breathing technique, a release practice and a renewal visualisation. Together they form a simple toolkit you can use to return to yourself at any time. You will understand how breath, release and renewal work as a single integrated practice, and how the tools from each phase can be mixed and matched depending on what you need in the moment. Every session lasts under ten minutes, and includes a clear explanation, a fully guided practice, and space to reflect. No experience needed. No pressure. Just consistent, compassionate guidance that meets you exactly where you are. This course is for you if you've been carrying stress in your body, feeling disconnected from yourself, or simply ready to reset. It's for anyone seeking practical tools - not theory, but techniques you can use immediately in real life. If you're ready to stop striving and start returning, this is your invitation. 30 days. 3 phases. 3 personal anchors. One way home. Begin again. Today.
Mark Mathews is a creative director and musician who has spent years exploring personal growth through yoga, meditation, and healing circles around the world. Navigating a busy and demanding life led him to develop practices that help manage stress, pause, and reconnect with oneself. His guided sessions support listeners in slowing down, noticing...

Les 1
Breathe: Arrive
This lesson invites you to arrive fully in your body and present moment. Through gentle, coherent breathing and mindful orientation to your surroundings, you begin to switch off survival mode, creating a calm baseline from which the rest of your journey can unfold.
Les 2
Breathe: The Calming Sigh
Today this lesson teaches the Physiological Sigh, a simple yet powerful double inhale followed by a long exhale that quickly relieves tension and calms the nervous system. This technique gives you an immediate, portable tool to reset when stress spikes, helping you feel steadier and more present.
Les 3
Breathe: Open And Expand
This lesson teaches intercostal expansion breathing, a technique that opens the ribs sideways and into the upper back to release chest tension, improve oxygen flow, and calm an overactive nervous system. You learn to guide the inhale gently into spaces the body often neglects, softening the shoulders and upper back with each exhale. It is a subtle, grounding practice that shifts shallow breathing patterns and creates a sense of openness and ease through the whole upper body.
Les 4
Breathe: Clear The Mind’s Static
Today’s practice helps you quiet mental chatter and break repetitive thought loops. Using the Pattern Interrupt Breath, you’ll gently reset your nervous system, creating space for calm, clarity, and presence in your day.
Les 5
Breathe: Release The Tension
Today’s practice teaches you to release lingering physical tension through the Pursed-Lip Pressure Release. By slowing the exhale and creating gentle back-pressure, you signal safety to your nervous system, allowing your body to unwind and let go of stress that has accumulated silently.
Les 6
Breathe: Heart In Harmony
Today, we introduce Resonant Heart Breathing, a practice that synchronises your breath with your heart to build emotional steadiness and resilience. By creating coherence between heart and breath, you support a calmer, more balanced nervous system and develop greater inner focus.
Les 7
Breathe: Ease Into Calm
Ease Into Calm teaches you to activate the ventral vagus nerve through slow, nasal, diaphragmatic breathing combined with gentle spinal extension. This practice shifts the nervous system from alert into genuine rest, promoting relaxation, bodily ease, and a calmer mind.
Les 8
Breathe: Focus And Flow
Focus and Flow introduces Box Breath, a four-phase breathing technique that sharpens attention, balances the nervous system, and creates a calm alertness. This practice trains the mind to move from distraction to clarity while maintaining steady presence in the body.
Les 9
Breathe: Vibrate To Relax
This lesson introduces Humming Breath, a gentle practice that uses soft vibration to calm the nervous system, release tension in the jaw, throat, and chest, and cultivate a deep sense of presence. This technique encourages stillness and refreshes both body and mind.
Les 10
Breathe: Find Your Anchor
Phase 1 of Start Again: Breathe – Finding Ground concludes here. Today, you pause to reflect on the nine techniques you’ve explored so far and choose the one that resonates most with you. This is your personal anchor breath - a method you can practise independently, bringing the calm, focus, or ease you need into real life. This chosen technique will become one of three steady practices you carry through the full 30-day course.
Les 11
Release: The Weight You Carry
Today, Phase 2 begins: Release – Creating Space. In this lesson, you turn your attention inward to notice the emotional and physical weight you carry. By observing it without trying to change it, you create room for ease, allowing tension to soften naturally. This simple act of awareness is the first step toward letting go of what no longer serves you.
Les 12
Release: Loosen The Grip
Today, you learn to loosen the mind’s grip. By noticing thoughts and gently saying “Not right now,” you create mental space without forcing change. This simple practice helps you step back, observe, and return to calm, building clarity and ease in everyday life.
Les 13
Release: Let The Day Fall Away
This practice helps you release accumulated tension by guiding your awareness through your body from head to toe. Using gentle imagery and breath, you'll let go of the weight the day has left behind—tight shoulders, mental residue, lingering worries—allowing it to slide away. This is a powerful transition practice for evenings or anytime you need to shed what you've been carrying and return to rest and presence.
Les 14
Release: Thoughts Are Weather
This session introduces a clear and practical way to relate to your thoughts without getting caught in them. By visualising the mind as a steady sky and each thought as a passing cloud, you learn to step back from mental noise, reduce reactivity, and cultivate a calmer internal environment. The aim is not to eliminate thoughts but to notice their movement with less effort and more space, strengthening your ability to return to a grounded centre.
Les 15
Release: The Unfinished Can Wait
This session focuses on the mental weight of unfinished tasks and the pressure to stay on top of everything. Instead of carrying a constant sense of urgency, you will practise acknowledging what is unresolved and giving it a temporary place outside your mind. This creates room to rest, think clearly, and move through the day without the pull of lingering responsibilities.
Les 16
Release: Pulling Back Your Energy
Today's lesson centres on recognising where your energy has become tangled in the expectations, moods, or opinions of others, and learning to reclaim that space. Through simple visualisation and breath awareness, you practise noticing what is yours and what is not, allowing you to stay connected without absorbing what drains you.
Les 17
Release: Release In The Body
This session shifts attention to the body and the physical tension that often remains even after mental or emotional release. You will explore where tightness is held and use slow, steady breathing to help those areas soften. The intention is simple: to notice without judgment, let the body unwind at its own pace, and create more ease and space within yourself.
Les 18
Release: Let Go Of Perfection
In this lesson, we focus on the strain created by perfectionism and the constant urge to perform, correct, or impress. You explore how this pressure keeps the body tense and the mind unsettled, and you use a simple breath-led mantra to soften that grip. The aim is to recognise that ease matters more than flawlessness, and that “good enough” genuinely supports a calmer, clearer system.
Les 19
Release: Make Space Inside
This session focuses on creating inner spaciousness. Rather than releasing a specific tension or thought, you work with the broader sense of mental crowding that builds over time. Through visualising an inner room, you notice what has accumulated and gently move it aside. The point is not to scrub the mind clean, but to make space for clarity and ease. This inner room becomes a place you can return to whenever life feels too full.
Les 20
Release: What Is Gone, Stays Gone
This lesson closes Phase 2: Release – Creating Space. You look back over the past nine days and choose the technique that felt most effective for you. There is no new guided method today. The work is to revisit the practice that brought the clearest sense of ease, and to run it on your own while the music plays. This becomes your personal release anchor, the tool you will carry into daily life. It is a rehearsal for real situations where letting go quickly and cleanly matters.
Les 21
Renew: A Fresh Start Inside
Day 21 marks the beginning of Phase 3: Renew – Inviting In. After twenty days of grounding and releasing, this session focuses on filling the space you’ve created with fresh energy, calm, and vitality. Through visualising light entering the chest and spreading through the body, you consciously invite renewal and a sense of new beginnings.
Les 22
Renew: The Future You
Today’s practice focuses on meeting your future self - a calm, aligned version of you that already exists in potential. By visualising or sensing this version, you train your nervous system to recognise ease, clarity, and grounded presence as familiar rather than foreign. This practice strengthens your connection to the calm, confident self you are already cultivating.
Les 23
Renew: Quiet Confidence
Day 23 focuses on cultivating quiet confidence - a grounded, steady sense of presence that doesn’t need to prove itself. Today’s practice combines visualisation and posture awareness to help you feel rooted, tall, and calm. By connecting with this felt sense in your body, you train your nervous system to recognise and return to confidence as a natural state, rather than something to perform or achieve.
Les 24
Renew: The Good That Awaits
This lesson focuses on cultivating gentle optimism for the future. The practice uses soft visualisation to invite your mind and body to sense ease, small successes, and positive moments ahead. By imagining the future with calm expectation, you allow your nervous system to experience openness and readiness, rather than bracing for struggle.
Les 25
Renew: Self-Trust
This lesson guides you to reconnect with your inner guidance through self-trust. Using a simple breath-linked mantra, you remind your nervous system that it’s safe to rely on your own instincts, decisions, and quiet knowing. The practice reinforces the small, lived experiences where you’ve trusted yourself, helping that confidence grow from the inside out.
Les 26
Renew: Open The Heart
This session guides you to open your heart and cultivate self-compassion. Using breath, posture, and gentle visualisation, you invite warmth to spread from your heart centre outward, creating a felt sense of kindness and self-regard. The practice helps the nervous system remember that it’s safe to be soft, receptive, and caring toward yourself.
Les 27
Renew: Gratitude Changes The Mind
This practice guides you to notice the small, real things that are working in your life right now. You’ll bring three truths of gratitude into your awareness and let the physical feeling of appreciation settle in your body, creating a sense of ease and calm.
Les 28
Renew: Call In What You Need
Today's lesson let's you explore the power of setting a gentle intention for how you want to feel tomorrow. By naming a feeling and breathing it into your body, you create a subtle compass point for your nervous system, priming yourself to notice and embody that state throughout the day. This session is about choosing presence and internal direction without forcing outcomes.
Les 29
Renew: Hold The Light
In this session, we bring together the three core phases of your journey: grounding, releasing, and inviting renewal. By combining these elements into one coherent practice, you experience the full toolkit you've built over the past weeks. This session shows you how to carry calm, clarity, and presence into daily life, even when stress arises.
Les 30
Renew: Come Home To Yourself
In today’s final lesson, we close Phase 3: Renew — Inviting In, and complete the entire 30-day journey. You’ll reflect on the renewal practices you’ve explored and choose the one that resonates most as your personal anchor. Combined with your techniques from Phase 1 and Phase 2, this gives you a complete toolkit to carry forward - a set of practices for grounding, releasing, and inviting in what you need whenever life demands it. Today is about recognising how far you’ve come, consolidating your learning, and stepping into your own power and presence.

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