Restorative Yoga

Reduce Stress, Gain Energy, and Find Balance

Ulrica Norberg

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781510727441
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Sport & Exercise Science
• Index: Biological Sciences

Restorative yoga is a gentle but powerful practice that is desperately needed in today's crazy-busy culture. It is rapidly gaining in popularity around the world because of its ability to relieve stress, heal the body, and promote overall well-being. Here world-renowned yoga instructor Ulrica Norberg shows the simple poses that will help you release anxiety, promote digestion, relieve headaches, recover from injuries, and more.Bolster pillows, yoga blocks, and blankets are an important part of restorative yoga. Norberg shows how to get the most out of your practice by utilizing these simple, easy-to-find props. Yogis will discover the power of letting go in both body and mind, opening themselves to greater possibilities in their yoga practices and in life.Accompanied by gorgeous full-color images that are as inspiring as they are useful, this book will change your yoga practice forever.

Chapter One

THE POWER OF SLOWING DOWN

“In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in a clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness.”

—Mahatma Gandhi

Our busy minds have taken over, and our lives are being built on strenuous efforts rather than allowing them to emerge naturally and effortlessly. We might strive for more wealth but we keep feeding cultural poverty—thus, we think we are doing more but feel like we are doing nothing. Many don’t know how to take a break, and many of us believe pausing is a sign of weakness.

Often we get so caught up in what everyone else is doing and what’s trendy that we get lost in the excitement of the new and its pressures and we forget how to slow down and reflect upon what we are bringing into our minds and into our lives, what we allow to consume us. Or worse, we become robotic and aimlessly live our lives trying to keep up with everyone else and becoming numb to our true desires and needs.

We need to feed both our superpowers within: the “doing” mode and “being” mode. The ancient yogis understood that when they called this practice yoga, to yoke polarities. When we connect our polarities, we start connecting to our inner shrine of intelligence. There are countless reasons why it’s great to keep up with the latest trends and to streamline processes in your life. It drives our productivity and frees up time to do things that are important to us, and it helps us grow. However, there are also reasons why slowing down regularly is one of the great super powers we have within.

Slow and Steady Wins the Race

In the fable, “The Tortoise and the Hare,” consistency and tenacity prevails over speed. This is especially true when it comes to anything worthwhile in life, anything important that you’re committed to for the long haul. When you are focused on doing one thing at a time and giving it your undivided attention, you give yourself space and time to reflect and react without distraction. With a calm mind, you are less likely to feel overwhelmed and are able to tune in to your surroundings. Being focused and intentional heightens your senses and intuition and allows you to enjoy the flavors of life while making confident decisions with mental clarity and deliberate intention.

When giving attention to one object or process, you are building a strong platform and connection to create the value and trust to sustain the outcome you seek. When you slow down you embrace the “less is more” philosophy and it can go a long way. That being said, there is value in multitasking, up to a point. It helps us step up our game, forcing us to try new things and discover new ways to do things, and certain processes can actually feed each other. But it is through regular rest that one frees up the mental capital to be able to stay present and thus perform better with better resources.

Restorative Yoga

The word yoga means “to yoke.” A yoga practice is meant to fuse together opposites in order to attain balance, or equanimity. In life as well as in yoga, we want to add what is not there, to find better balance. So if we are stressed, rushed, and on-the-go, we need to add in more relaxation, pausing and doing less, in order to get ourselves back into flowing better with life.

Yoga practices are designed to help an individual feel whole, so taking a yoga class can do wonders for the body, mind, and spirit. And very often when one comes into a yoga class, there are mainly physical poses, asana, and breathing techniques, pranayama, ending in the savasana relaxation pose for a couple of minutes; not much time is given to restore more deeply.

Yoga Master B. K. S. Iyengar developed the practice of restorative yoga. He is recognized as one of the greatest master yogis in postmodern times and is the founder of the more alignment-oriented hatha yoga style called Iyengar yoga. Iyengar learned yoga from his master and father-in-law, Sri Krishnamacharya, one of the most influential yoga masters in the twentieth century.

Iyengar learned early on while teaching yoga that pain or injury often resulted from a student straining in a pose. So he followed advice from his teacher to modify the poses, and in doing so, he got experimental and invented props out of strings, trees, bricks, rolled up blankets, and sacks of sand. He saw that modifying the poses and adding the props helped his students to move more safely into the poses and their breath improved dramatically when the alignment of the body was in better balance. He also started to see that placing students in passive poses, where the props gave the shape to the body and where the body could lean onto them, gave remarkable results in stress reduction and healing. Those of us who have had the privilege to study with him found that while he could be very strict and quite harsh, he taught us much about ourselves and the human body and how to access it in intelligent ways. Thanks to B. K. S. Iyengar, we have many phenomenal methods to heal, restore, de-stress, and reboot our systems.

As I see it, Iyengar was one of the most important teachers, since he emphasized that the body holds a deep intelligence. He was able to decode some of the mysteries of the human body and make yoga applicable to different physical conditions. I remember him saying in class once, “Go inside gently and stay. If you suffer in the pose, you need to make the pose work better for you. While you are there, experience the pose. Listen to your body, not the mind, since it bears no real truth, only reaction.” His words were so important to me then and they still echo in my practice to this day.

Restorative yoga is a kind of active relaxation, since its techniques help us learn how to unwind, relax, and de-stress in order to reboot and restore our nervous system by taking as much pressure off our bodily functions as possible. The aim is to feel weightless. The way we do that is by using different props to support the body so we can let go of all tension. We stay in the poses for a long time so the nervous system will alternate from firing from its active part to its more restorative part.

So the aim is to communicate with the brain through the supported poses in a way that tells the body there is no tension, no danger anywhere. After a while, the brain gets the message and will lower the stress hormones and increase the life-enhancing hormones that we need in order to heal and feel well.

Restorative yoga is pretty clear: grab the props you need, set yourself up in a nice space, settle into a pose, stay there, let go, and breathe. Gina Menza feels, “Unlike other exercises, this practice places minimal metabolic demand on you and increases your energy rather than subtracting from it.”

All the organ systems of the body benefit from deep relaxation, and a few of the measurable results are the reduction of blood pressure, serum triglycerides, and blood sugar levels, and increase of the “good cholesterol” levels. Deep relaxation also provides an improvement in digestion, fertility, elimination, the reduction of muscle tension, insomnia, and generalized fatigue.

“Restorative yoga helps to release tension on a physical, mental, and emotional level. Since our bodies store all our past experiences, when we let go of the hold on the physical body we often have strong emotional releases as suppressed emotions bubble up. For this reason, it’s very important to create a supportive environment,” according to Yogaraj Mona Anand, co-creator of ISHTA's approach to restorative yoga. Very often, students come into restorative on overdrive, she says. “Music, candlelight, essential oils, and gentle asana can help slow down their energy in preparation for restorative postures. When students have trouble surrendering, visualizations, breath awareness, and body scans are useful tools to help still the mind,” she continues.

According to Mona, restorative postures are a powerful way of rebalancing our energy. “We can choose from a variety of poses to help achieve this: backbends lift our energy, forward bends calm our energy, twists calm the nervous system and help with digestion, and inversions quiet the mind. Restorative yoga can be practiced by everyone. Pillows, blocks, blankets, towels—anything that helps support the body can be used to create a restorative pose. People who aren’t physically able to practice asana, such as the elderly and physically challenged, can practice restorative yoga and reap the benefits of deep relaxation and energy rebalancing,” she adds.

This is a practice that can be done safely at home, but since poses are held for an extended period of time, a basic understanding of the practice is important initially. Or consult an experienced teacher. I learned through Mona and Gina, my dear friends and colleagues in restorative yoga, that holding postures for an extended period of time, when not correctly aligned, can lead to physical and energetic imbalances. According to Mona, there are also poses that are not appropriate for different physical and emotional issues. For example, she says, “A person with a heart condition might not want to practice an inversion, a person with lower back sensitivity may need to modify a restorative forward bend, and someone with an anxiety disorder may need to modify a backbend.” So, with an understanding of the alignment of restorative postures and the benefits and contraindications of the poses we put ourselves in, you can start to explore this on your own and make it a home practice.

The first time I tried restorative yoga was in the late nineties in a class with Judith Hanson Lasater, physical therapist, Iyengar yoga teacher, and one of the most influential restorative yoga teachers today. At the time, my practice was flavored with more vigorous styles of yoga (ashtanga, vinyasa, and power yoga), but I had gotten more and more interested in the Iyengar yoga system due to its more anatomical focus and emphasis on alignment.

I heard of Judith through another Iyengar teacher I had the privilege to study with, Patricia Walden. She mentioned Judith and, when a workshop opportunity came up, I signed up, not really knowing what to expect. In the weeks leading up to her workshop, my life was chaos and I had some tough challenges, was recovering from a bad breakup, and also feeling quite lost in life.

The first day of the workshop I just wanted to run away, to get the hell out of there. My mind was so restless, my body was tensed up, and I was irritated at everyone around me. I can still hear Judith’s words play back to me: pause, just be, let go. I felt so alone, vulnerable, open. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to pick myself up after letting it all go. My controlled behavior had me in such a tight grip. I saw it, but I didn’t know how to get out of it. I cried myself to sleep that night.

After the second day’s first practice, it all changed. In one of the inversion poses we held for over twenty minutes, I just surrendered all of a sudden. In my mind, I heard: Ulrica, you are here now. Do as she says. Try it out. What do you have to lose? Let the practice take care of you. You know it will. You can do it. If you break, you break. But what if you don’t? What if you can heal?

I let go and cried. An assistant came over and placed more blankets on me. She said nothing, just placed her hands gently on my shoulders and stayed there until I had no more tears. I took a couple of breaths and that was that. I got out of the pose and moved on to the next one. I felt relieved, lighter, but quite shaky.

It was like a thick armor of tension and stress I had been carrying inside for a long time was gone. That inspired me, since it felt so great. After that class, the assistant (who is now one of my closest friends) gave me a spontaneous hug and said, “Great job. That stuff needed to be released. Congratulations.”

The days to follow taught me so much about myself since I took the time to focus internally. I felt safe, nurtured, held, and like I was floating—I felt free. And most importantly, I learned what relaxation was and how to get there.

Years would pass until I took a longer restorative training, and even longer before I started to teach it. I felt I still had so much to learn, so much to shed before I could settle in that seat of comfort inside myself. A couple of slow yoga trainings later and hundreds of hours being propped up on my mat, and I have grown to love, appreciate, and deeply value this practice. Today, it is a weekly necessity. It gives me such nourishment, and I see the marvelous benefits in my colleagues and students as well.

Individualizing the Practice

I share the love of this practice with two of my dear friends and yoga colleagues, Master ISHTA Teacher, Yogiraj Mona Anand and Senior ISHTA Teacher Gina Menza, who both teach restorative yoga in New York City. Together, they created the ISHTA approach to restorative yoga that stems from the Iyengar yoga method, yet adds more focus on the individualization of the practice and the subtle body. Their approach focuses on balancing physical, emotional, Ayurvedic, and energetic imbalances by integrating visualization, pranayama, kriya techniques, yoga nidra, and essential oils into the practice. “We teach our students to recognize their imbalances and give them the tools to bring themselves back into balance,” they say in unison.

ISHTA restorative yoga brings in a more personal approach, integrating visualization, mantra, pranayama, and kriya techniques. In this way, we can teach each student to recognize their imbalances and give them the tools to find balance on their own so they can live their lives to the fullest, rather than settle for just surviving and striving. The aim is to live and appreciate life, not just survive it.

For Gina, restorative yoga balances her otherwise quite busy life since it adds relaxation, support, and stillness. For her, teaching restorative yoga is equally as divine as practicing it herself.

Gina feels that to receive the energy created by a roomful of yogis is the best gift. “Restorative yoga provides the perfect antidote to stress because it creates a supported pause,” Mona says. “Softening the body, evening the breath, and quieting the mind change the actual chemistry of the body as both sides of the nervous system adjust,” Gina adds.

Restorative yoga has helped Mona through severe asthma. She was continually in and out of the hospital and put on high levels of cortisone for an extended period, which created extreme anxiety and panic attacks. Practicing restorative yoga proved integral to her recovery, calming her nervous system, relaxing her body, and releasing tension from the breath, all of which had been bracing for future asthma attacks. No amount of trying to talk herself out of the situation had helped because her whole system was stuck in a heightened state of tension.

“I needed to bypass my mind and activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which is exactly what restorative does,” she told me. “By completely supporting the body and being still for an extended length of time, the breath, the mind, and the nervous system begin to calm down. Different restorative poses can be used for different purposes, though they all help to calm and quiet the nervous system. There are poses that open the breath and lift our spirits when we’re feeling depressed, poses that are supportive and nurturing when we’re feeling anxious, and poses that target specific parts of the body where tension accumulates.”

The ISHTA yoga restorative approach appeals to me greatly since it has the foundation of the Iyengar prac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Foreword by Kavi Yogiraj Alan Finger
• Introduction: Life and the Importance of Pausing
• Chapter One: The Power of Slowing Down
• Chapter Two: The Science Behind Yoga
• Chapter Three: Restorative Techniques
• Chapter Four: Surrendering into Balance
• Chapter Five: Meditations from the Mat
• References
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author