The What, Who & Why You Need Restorative Yoga
- Bridgette Ruggles
- Aug 27, 2018
- 4 min read
What?
Restorative yoga, at its simplest, it is exactly what the name says: it restores. From there, it gets more complicated. Restores what? We’re going to leave that much bigger answer until the end because it requires background, a foundation of understanding, before it doesn’t sound trite.
It is a style of yoga that is about slowing down, minimizing effort and finding calm in crazy lives. Anyone who has taken a class with me knows my love of props, and in restorative, it is all props, all the time. This is the practice I come home to and it is the one I recommend to everyone.
Restorative poses are fully supported with blankets, bolsters, blocks, chairs, straps… whatever will work to fill the spaces and allow the practitioner to let go of effort. No gripping, no bracing with the arms, no struggling with balance; we form the shape, we prop ourselves up, and gravity does the work.
It is the most mellow of yoga styles. The poses are held for several minutes each and there may only be a handful over the course of an hour.
What are you doing while you are relaxing in these poses?
You are breathing. You are meditating. You coax the mind into staying in the present. Our minds can be a little feral and they do not always cooperate with this goal. The mind too often races from thought to thought, leaping to wild tangents and chasing what-ifs to the most absurd conclusions our fertile imaginations can dream up.
Your beloved body cannot tell the difference between your brain’s wild imaginings and real threats. While your brain is pursuing the endless threads of possibility, or ruminating on old events that still haunt you, the body will react as if they are happening. Your heart will beat faster, your breath will shift, your hormones will respond.
In yoga, the teacher’s voice, a change in music, a cuing of the next pose, reminds you where you are. You come back to the breath and the present. The body and the mind get a do-over.
When you return to the breath you get to reassure the body that, in this moment, you are safe. You can see which thoughts are leading you away from peace and later, now that they are identified, you can make a plan to deal with them.
Who?
Restorative yoga is for everyone. Anyone who works, parents, navigates traffic, waits in line, has family, fears or ambitions needs time to take a breath and nurture themselves. In our over-stimulated society, relaxation is hard won and precious.
With props every pose can be amended to account for tender knees, sore backs and stiff hamstrings. The hardest part is wrangling the mind and sitting in stillness. If you’ve been chasing minions or children all day, it might be the best part.
Why?
The autonomic nervous system regulates the body’s unconscious functions with the goal of achieving equilibrium. There are two sides to its coin: Sympathetic (the famous ‘fight or flight’) and parasympathetic (rest and digest). Unconscious is the key word. The autonomic system does not like change and will actively seek its most familiar state. You cannot simply decide to change gears. There’s no clutch, no switch, no button; if stress is your constant, if your body is most familiar with fight or flight, that’s where you will default to.
Adrenaline increases your heart rate and elevates blood pressure. Its partner, cortisol, alters the immune system and suppresses digestion and other “nonessential” functions.
Prolonged stress increases the risk of anxiety, depression, digestive problems, headaches, heart disease, weight gain, insomnia, and a host of other problems.
Chronically elevated levels of cortisol can lead to insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes and bone loss.
Worrying about a project that feels like life or death is no different to your body than an actual life or death situation. This stress leaves us stuck in ‘fight or flight’, releasing adrenaline and noradrenaline hormones in a bid to save you from threats that only exist in the mind. Letting the mind ruminate on painful, frightening memories causes this same cascade. The body only knows what the mind is telling it – but you have the ability to consciously step in to tell it something different.
Yes, I am referring to you – conscious you – as something different from your wandering mind. You can use this distinction to rescue yourself from your thoughts and the harm of chronic stress.
Yoga, especially restorative yoga, is an excellent tool for engaging the parasympathetic nervous system and changing the body’s state from stressed to calm. The breath is something we can control. The body will follow the breath and the body can lead the mind.
Here’s where we get back to “Restores what?”
The benefits of restorative yoga are the opposite of the costs of stress. Think of it as a factory reset option. Restorative yoga gives us the opportunity to re-educate our nervous system, to put the parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest) back in charge. You get to restore the natural state of YOU.
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Restorative yoga sounds really interesting!