Regular Restorative practice helps keep me balanced
Keeping warm with my wool blanket and dark with my eye pillow during Savasana.
The December Monthly Challenge was nicknamed 5 for 5.
A challenge I made for myself was to attend the Sunday night Restorative Yoga class at my yoga studio every Sunday in December (as long as I was in town). (I won’t be attending this coming Sunday as I will be out of town.)
The first four Sundays in December I attended the class. And actually I attended the last Sunday in November and the Sunday before that I attended a 2-hour Restorative workshop.
This past week I have been off work with little planned. I have incorporated more and longer Restorative poses in my home practice. At the end of every home practice I have a Savasana.
Vickie reminds her students as we are getting into a Restorative pose that we should be warm, comfortable and even (body should be symmetrical). And it should be dark and quiet.
There are times when I don’t feel like doing an active home practice. Those days I do an all Restorative practice with just a couple of poses. I am now well-equipped with props, such as bolsters and blankets, which really support me in particular poses.
I feel like having a regular Restorative practice keeps me calm and balanced and keeps my weight in check. Studies have been done on the many wonderful things that happen to us when we have a regular Restorative practice.
Restorative yoga, with its emphasis on supported poses, allows the body to enter the deep, restful state it craves, which is attributed to this Yoga Journal article. “When you stop agitating it, the body starts to repair itself,” says Judith Hanson Lasater, who is a Restorative Yoga teacher among other types of yoga and has been a consultant on three NIH studies on various aspects of yoga .