Restorative Yoga: Your little wisdom party
Restorative yoga is awesome for people who want some relief from physical or mental tension. It allows the wisdom of your body to reveal itself - it knows how to let the body heal itself.
We are constantly on the move. Sure, sleep is restorative, but if you do not get enough good quality sleep then you may be going about your days in a permanent stressed state. Without intervention, this can lead to chronic stress and living half a life.
Restorative yoga is about moving into supported shapes and allowing our bodies and our minds to radically chill out. This allows the other aspects of ourselves to have a chance to be heard. One of the quietest but most profound voices we usually ignore is our in-built wisdom to know and heal ourselves.
Our body hears what our mind thinks
Our physical body and our mental body are the same thing. One influences the other. They are also fueled by the same fuel - our breath. Change the breath and you’ll change how relaxed you feel and the quality of your thoughts.
My beautiful doggie passed away last year. We knew it was coming and we hoped we will know when the right time to send her to sleep was. One morning she just couldn’t get up. I knew in that split second that today was the day. Five seconds later I got a nose bleed. I hadn’t had one since my 20s. From that day on, I have had absolutely no doubt in the connection between our mind and our body.
There is another aspect of ourselves that is influencing us too: Our wisdom body.
This is where perception, intuition and ‘gut feeling’ lies. Our wisdom body knows what we ignore. It has the knowledge of everything we’ve been and want to be. Our wisdom body knows every pathway, electrical field and organ in our body - and it knows how to heal itself. But only if we relax our bodies and mind. Our wisdom body appears when it has the room to rise and boogie. It’s always dressed and ready but never gets invited to the party!
Restorative yoga allows your wisdom body to surface.
Certain relaxed shapes using supportive cushions, blocks and blankets means your body and mind can turn the music down. Restorative shapes allow your body to return to where it came from before your over-achieving mind grabbed all the fuel in your body. Relax your body to relax your mind.
When you do a supported Restorative Yoga pose you allow your body to release what it is holding and masking. Your overactive mind will get out of the way because you are giving it less and less attention. You use deep breathing to release muscles, nerves and pathways to organs and regulatory systems like digestion, immunity and the nervous system. Your nervous system will switch to rest and digest because your muscles releasing and your conscious breathing tells your brain that all is well. Again, this happens when we are sleeping too. But stress and anxiety greatly effects the quality and amount of sleep we get.
Your body cannot heal when it is stressed. It is biologically impossible.
The mind’s sole job is to keep us safe. For most of us, our mind is a total over-achiever. Our mind plays tricks on us to make sure we avoid pain and lean towards pleasure. It’s very black and white in that way. Wisdom lives in neither pleasure or pain. Wisdom lives in between. Your body’s ability to heal itself is activated when both physical and mental tension is released.
Even if you have major medical or physical conditions you will still get relief from physically and mentally letting go. Your body is not only copying with a new shape or state that has been forced on it, but it is struggling to accept where you are right now. You can find lovely moments of ease in yoga practices. It changes your relationship with pain, discomfort and a general feeling that there must be more to life. That’s because there is!
You’ll have a little wisdom party each time you take a restorative shape.
Every week I hear people say, “I need to relax more”. We all know what we need to do. We are being told by doctors, partners or colleagues. But using the same strategy (the mind) that got you here in the first place, is just bonkers.
Experience Restorative Yoga with me or on You Tube or at another studio. Most yoga studios do their own version. I do a mix of restorative, breath work and the incredible Yoga Nidra which accelerates your wisdom body’s potential to make you feel so much better.
My BeCalm Yourself 5-classes series explores profound rest and relaxation so your body can do it’s thing - restore and heal itself. The difference over five weeks is life changing for some.