Tiara Brooke Chen on Why the Stiffest Person in the Room Needs Yoga Most

Most people who walk into my office already know they're dysregulated. That's not the problem. The problem is that they've been told the only way out is to talk about it for an hour first, and some of them will never get there. The body is a legitimate entry point. For a certain kind of client (usually, though not only, men), it's the only entry point that's going to work.

So I sat down with Tiara Brooke Chen, who teaches yoga and mindfulness here in Hong Kong, to pressure-test something I'd been recommending for years without a practitioner's language for it.

“

A lot of them are actually really shy to go for class because there's a lot of females there, but a lot of them are really stiff.

Tiara Brooke Chen, yoga & mindfulness teacher

Watch Video8:56

The Stiffness Is the Reason to Go

Men don't avoid yoga because they think it's pointless. They avoid it because they think they'll be bad at it, and being visibly bad at something in a room full of strangers is, for a lot of men in this city, close to unbearable. That's the whole mechanism. It isn't spiritual objection. It's shame with a gym membership.

What Tiara notices is both dynamics at once. The room does skew female, which puts some men off, but the bigger barrier is that so many of them are, in her word, stiff, and they don't want that on display.

Stiffness is never only physical. It's tight hips from ten hours at a desk in Central, a chest locked around shallow stress breathing, and underneath both, a story that real exercise looks like a barbell and anything else is a hobby for someone else. The logic runs backwards: I'm too stiff for the room, so I'll stay out of the room, so I'll stay stiff.

In men's mental health work I push toward something physical and non-competitive precisely because there's no scoreboard to hide behind. Yoga isn't soft. It's uncomfortable in exactly the places you've spent a decade routing around. That's not a side effect of the practice. That's the practice.

It's Discipline, Not Stretching

Call it stretching and you've already missed it. What you're training on the mat is the capacity to stay inside an uncomfortable sensation without immediately fixing it, fleeing it, or numbing it out, which is, more or less, the entire job description of emotional regulation.

For Tiara, the work runs deeper than the poses. A real practice trains attention and restraint as much as it trains flexibility.

Discipline here doesn't mean punishing yourself into a pretzel. It means you noticed the urge to bail at minute forty and you stayed anyway. If that sounds familiar, it should. It's the same muscle good therapy builds, except on the mat you get to build it somewhere the stakes are low and the feedback is immediate.

The research on mindful movement points the same way: lower reactivity, better interoception, the unglamorous skill of knowing what your body is telling you before it starts shouting. One hard class where you didn't bolt when it got uncomfortable is data enough.

Start Smaller Than You Think

Beginners fail at meditation because they start with the advanced version and then conclude they're constitutionally unsuited to it. Silent sitting on day one, with a mind like a pinball machine, is not a test of your character. It's just a badly designed first rep.

The rule of thumb she teaches is to "go simple basic" and build from there. There are dozens of meditation forms and techniques, and she leans toward guided sessions because "there is something for you to focus on." Guided audio gives the pinball a lane. That's the entire advantage, and it's enough. The format isn't a moral choice, it's a fit question: "Everyone connects with it differently. You have to really just try each one and see what works." Silence is calming for some people and torture for others, and the only way to find out which you are is to run the experiment.

The starter protocol I'd actually give a client: two minutes, not twenty. Guided first, with a voice that doesn't annoy you. Same time, same place for a week; the MTR platform counts. When you reach for your phone, that's the rep to notice. After a week, try one silent session and see what breaks. Pair it with making mindfulness work in real life for more beyond the cushion.

When Regulation Becomes Avoidance

Here's the failure mode nobody warns you about. Yoga and meditation are regulation tools, and regulation tools can be used to not feel things just as easily as to feel them. White-knuckling through a panic attack in child's pose. Performing calm while your marriage is on fire. That's avoidance wearing Lululemon, and it's harder to spot than drinking, because everyone around you keeps congratulating you on it.

Add therapy when:

• The dysregulation keeps winning (relationships, work, sleep, substance use)
• Trauma memories surface and you can't ground
• You're doing all the "right" wellness things and still feel stuck

We work alongside whatever movement practice you choose. Our anxiety and depression team does this constantly, and the two don't compete. And if the stiffness turns out to be nothing-is-wrong shame in disguise, which it often is, that's worth naming out loud rather than stretching around.

Tiara Brooke Chen teaches yoga and mindfulness in Hong Kong. The full conversation is in the video at the top of this post.