A restorative experience

New Month, New Season, New Courses

We'll take our cues from nature, thank you. And you are part of nature.

Much of our current community, including myself, is heading into perimenopause, in it, or over the hump. I'm here for us with do-it-yourself daily practices to increase your your window of tolerance for the fluctuations and improve your bio-psycho-social experience while weathering the intense experience. A Yoga Therapy group experience starts you off with a kindred support system you can build your new skills with

Autumn asks us to slow down, go inside and release what we are gripping. This month’s meditation is the nudge we all need to embrace the spirit of the season.

You've asked for restorative Yoga. This month we will begin a new monthly class, Floor Yoga - a restorative experience. Our approach to restoring you is novel in our local Yoga climate, yet ancient, reliable and aligned with Patanjali’s citta vrtti nirodha perspective. That is the crux of its unique teaching style, calming the mind and turning it inward to support self-healing. The “style” of restorative uses a plethora of props to support you, and we will too, yet without a distinct, Yogic task, mind will drift off. We’ll layer tools to ensure your body AND your mind are doing Yoga. The goal is not to get you into a position, but to enable you to experience ease and stability within them, physically and mentally.

Yoga offers a dual strategy to restore you, a top down approach and a bottom up approach. Top down practices are more mental in nature, starting in the mind and spreading into the body. Intention, concentration, listening, counting, mantra…all of these can serve as an on switch for the mind’s capacity to reframe reality to elicit a calm mind and off switch for mental stress.

While from a guna perspective, a restorative floor class will be more tamasic compared to an active class; however, there’s a fine line between lethargic and relaxed, zoning out and a curated, mental calm. We aim for sattva guna to arise, with a healthy mix of tamas and rajas, ordered as such. Tamas is required to relax, and on the extreme end it is sleep. Rajas is required to focus, and we include enough so your attention does not wander. Nothing wrong with napping, if that is what you need, and you can go there if that is what your experience is calling for. Not our goal, though.

Bottom up strategy is when we use physical means to relax the mind, and restorative Yoga is famous for this. Many props and highly modified versions of asana-s. We will use props. We will modify. But we will remain actively mentally engaged in order to ensure a repatterning is occurring, that it’s not just your body doing the Yoga, but your mind, too. In bottom up practices, such as asana, mudra, nyasa, breathing, the mind is still a necessary tool for the restorative transformation.

Sometimes, restoring means we’ve spent quality time building healthy new patterns to lessen the impact of limitations and pain. When you can take these patterns with you, repeat them on the couch, in your bed, even in your lounge chair or on the doctor’s table, our purpose, Yoga’s purpose, is served.