We tend to favor activities that ask us to use our muscular body, but we are already doing that all day. Discovering where and how we hold tension helps us find room for change, so that tension won’t limit our physical, emotional, and mental wellness and our comfort in our body. The actual effort involved in restorative yoga is the willingness to look at how and where we are holding tension, and to relax our body on the ground, allowing the breath to come in more, so the tension that we find can be softened or less gripping. Restorative yoga is about, “How can I let my body and mind unwind? How can I do less?” 2. Restorative yoga helps us discover where we are holding tension.
For many of us, hatha yoga practices can easily become another opportunity to over-effort or get caught up in accomplishing or striving to get better at a pose. Restorative yoga uses long-held, supported resting poses to create the conditions for us to cultivate the skill of conscious relaxation and most importantly to release unnecessary habitual tension in the body and mind. It’s a little bit closer to a meditation practice than a movement practice-it’s a way of practicing “meditation” as a somatic, embodied experience. Restorative yoga helps us cultivate the skill of conscious relaxation.Ī restorative practice is more of a yin style of yoga, as opposed to more yang styles that involve more movement and more muscular effort, Pransky says. Here, Pransky explains four of the main benefits of restorative yoga, and why it’s an essential antidote for our fast-paced, stressed-out lives. On the contrary, I think it’s the most advanced practice.” Or if you’re sick or injured and you can’t get to regular vinyasa class, people think restorative yoga is ‘all’ you can do. “People think, ‘I did my five vigorous yoga classes, now I deserve a treat.’ They think of it as a massage or a pampering. “While restorative yoga is a healing practice, it’s not just a physical ‘recovery’ practice,” Pransky says. Think restorative yoga is an easy, “recovery” practice akin to a candlelit massage? On the contrary, it’s actually an advanced practice, says Jillian Pransky, director of Restorative Therapeutic Yoga teacher training for YogaWorks who leads Yoga Journal’s upcoming online course, Restorative Yoga 101: Journey Into Stillness With the Tools and Practice to Heal, Restore, and Rejuvenate. This four-week program offers students an in-depth look at eight essential poses that will help you elicit the relaxation response, simple prop setups that will help encourage deep mind-body release and healing, guided meditative sequences and breathing exercises, mind-body alignment lectures, and personal inquiry.
In YJ’s newest course, Restorative Yoga 101, Jillian Pransky, director of Restorative Therapeutic Yoga teacher training for YogaWorks and author of Deep Listening, will have you rethinking rest one deep breath at a time. For exclusive access to all our stories, including sequences, teacher tips, video classes, and more,