Yoga Journal Presents Restorative Yoga for Life

A Relaxing Way to De-stress, Re-energize, and Find Balance

Gail Boorstein Grossman

• Publisher: Adams Media
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781440575211
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Sport & Exercise Science
• Index: Biological Sciences

Restorative yoga poses for healing your mind and body!Written by instructor Gail Boorstein Grossman, E-RYT 500, CYKT, and published in partnership with Yoga Journal, Restorative Yoga for Life teaches you how to practice restorative yoga--a form of yoga that focuses on physical and mental relaxation through poses aided by props. It's a gentle yet empowering style that helps you de-stress and re-energize. While restorative yoga is beneficial for your entire body, Gail also shows you how to treat more than twenty ailments, such as headaches, digestive issues, and anxiety, through specific yoga poses and sequences. Guided by step-by-step instructions and beautiful photographs, you will gently ease your way into inner calm and better health with powerful yoga sequences.Whether you're having trouble sleeping, suffering from backaches, or just want to unwind after a busy day, you will find balance throughout your body, soul, and mind with Restorative Yoga for Life.

PART 1
What Is Restorative Yoga?

“Healing is a matter of time, but it is sometimes also a matter of opportunity.”

—Hippocrates, ancient Greek physician

There are many styles of yoga, each founded in certain aims and goals of practitioners both ancient and modern. But what is restorative yoga? In this section, you’ll be introduced to the history of this very recent yoga practice and explore its roots. You’ll also learn about restorative yoga’s many benefits—physical and psychological—that have contributed to the popularity of the practice, and how you can use restorative yoga to feel better in your body, calmer in your mind, and happier in your life. But just learning about restorative yoga isn’t enough. You also need to educate yourself about the philosophies, related practices, and bodies of knowledge that support yoga in general. Knowing a little about Ayurveda and the chakra system, in particular, can help you gain a deeper understanding of your body. So be sure to read all of the information in this first part carefully before you begin—there is a lot to know about restorative yoga!

CHAPTER 1
History of Restorative Yoga

“Be at least as interested in what goes on inside you as what happens outside. If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place.”

—Eckhart Tolle, writer and public speaker

You may know that there are many different styles of yoga. If you are someone who likes to sweat when you exercise, you may want to practice a more vigorous style of yoga, such as Ashtanga or Power Vinyasa. There is also Bikram yoga, which, by virtue of being practiced in a very heated room, will make you sweat. If you prefer a gentler style of yoga, you may want to practice gentle yoga, Hatha yoga, Kripalu yoga, or Iyengar yoga; while you may still sweat in these classes, they are less vigorous.

In this chapter you’ll learn about the relatively new practice of restorative yoga, which is unique in that it uses props to hold you in poses for a period of time, as opposed to moving at a faster pace. You see, yoga is so much more than physical exercise. It incorporates both a philosophy of how to live and physical postures that you can practice. Yoga not only increases flexibility and strength, but will also help you quiet your mind and engender a deeper connection to yourself. But what really makes restorative yoga special? Read on.

What Is Restorative Yoga?

Restorative yoga is a deeply relaxing style of yoga practice. It is a receptive practice, not an active practice. Unlike the more active styles of yoga where poses “flow” into one another, in restorative yoga poses are held from five to as long as twenty minutes. During this time, you are held in “shapes” while being supported with blankets, blocks, or bolsters (pillows). The shapes emulate the forms of some more active poses found in Ashtanga, Vinyasa, or Iyengar such as a back bend, forward bend, twist, or inversion. When you are in the poses you are completely supported in a particular shape, which helps achieve the desired benefit—it could open up your lungs, release tension in your lower back, or any of the other benefits discussed later in Chapter 2—as well as help you feel comfortable enough to “let go.”

In any style of yoga, part of the practice is about letting go of the ego. Restorative yoga is no different. Yoga teaches patience, devotion, and faith. When you apply the teachings both on and beyond the mat, your mind is better able to adjust to the stresses of everyday life and is brought into harmony with your body. In restorative yoga, the body and mind are brought into balance, and begin to “talk” to each other. When you practice this type of yoga, you enter into a state of deep relaxation. It is here that you can “let go” of those deep holding patterns in your body and find a state of balance that will allow your body to heal. Look at it as if you were a flower. You start with good soil (the foundation), add sunshine and water, and the flower opens into a beautiful bloom. You are like a flower; you need the right environment to allow yourself to unfold and become the best version of yourself. Restorative yoga is that environment.

We often forget that sometimes we need to just take time to relax. We are not human “doings,” we are human beings. If you think that there is no way you can relax, you need restorative yoga more than you know. As with meditation practice, it takes time to train the mind to find some quiet. In fact, some people find the practice of restorative yoga to be the most difficult of all yoga practices because it is so hard to be still. Your body may be at rest, but that doesn’t mean your mind will follow! Be prepared for when the mind starts to ramble. This is the moment where you will need to call upon yourself to find stillness, what practicing yoga is all about. You can equate the process to training a puppy. You tell it to sit and stay; it gets up two seconds later. You take the puppy back to where it started and try again. This time it may stay a little longer, until eventually it stays until you tell it to move. In restorative yoga, we build up to being able to stay longer. This is the kind of stamina that every one of us could use.

Restorative yoga is best done daily for maximum benefit, but can be done as little as once a week to see results. Restorative postures can also be integrated into a regular yoga practice to give greater balance to a more active practice and lifestyle. I assure you, once you get the hang of restorative yoga, you will fall in love!

Yogic Wisdom

Yoga is often passed on from teacher to student, so use caution when you begin. If you will not have supervision it is always wise to consult your physician first. This book does not replace a medical professional!

How Did Restorative Yoga Begin?

Now that you know what restorative yoga is, it’s important for you to know how the practice began. The development of restorative yoga poses began in 1937 with B.K.S. Iyengar, a master yoga teacher from Pune, India.

Iyengar learned yoga from his yoga teacher and brother-in-law, Tirumalai Krishnamacharya. Iyengar was a sickly teenager, and yoga helped him to regain his strength. He soon become a star pupil and actually replaced another one of Krishnamacharya’s students in a yoga competition. Back then, it was commonplace to have yoga competitions to show the public the skill of these students and educate the public on the practice. Restorative yoga grew out of Iyengar’s need to find therapeutic poses that would help him heal and restore his physical body.

Iyengar began teaching yoga at the age of eighteen. While teaching, Iyengar noticed his students straining in postures that could result in injury and pain. When people first come to yoga, they tend to bring the “no pain no gain” mentality along with their mats. In traditional yoga, practitioners challenge themselves to advance, and often try to advance at a fast pace, which can often cause injury. This is precisely what Iyengar was noticing in his classes—people pushing themselves too far, and causing injury. While pain is inevitable in any practice where you are working with your body, you never want to cause injury. Unlike the more active styles of yoga, restorative yoga’s philosophy looks a lot different. Here, you learn to push yourself more gently—without a competitive attitude. Here, it’s “no pain = gain.”

This idea is what led Iyengar to incorporate props into his yoga practice so that poses could be modified and practiced without strain, helping people recover from injury, overworking, and illness in a therapeutic way. Props are exactly what they sound like: pillows called bolsters, blocks, chairs, the wall, blankets—all of which prop you up in positions that help you hold a healing shape for a period of time. Restorative yoga poses originated in the Iyengar tradition, using props to help each individual student find the alignment of each specific posture that works best for his or her body in any given moment. As time went on, Iyengar traveled to the West to share his teachings with others. When people began to understand the benefits of yoga, they traveled from all over the world to study with him. Until his death in 2014 at the age of 95, Iyengar certified teachers in his style of yoga, and those teachers disseminated the teachings in their own countries.

To this day people travel to India to learn from the Iyengar family, to recover from injury and from both physical and emotional illnesses. Iyengar’s son Prashant and daughter Geeta both have carried on his teachings, as has his granddaughter Abhijata.

Yoga has a long, rich history, a history that we in the West are only beginning to understand. The information presented here will help introduce you to the practice, and hopefully inspire you to learn more about its history and philosophies. Restorative yoga is a relatively new style of yoga, and is becoming popular because it addresses the ills of our fast-paced society so effectively. It gives the body a real sense of the healing power of just being still, whic...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1: What Is Restorative Yoga?
• Part 2: Getting Started
• Part 3: The Sequences
• Afterword: Where to Go from Here
• Appendix: Recommended Reading
• About the Author
• Acknowledgments
• Marketing Page
• Copyright