Sacred pause yoga

a space to stop, notice, and be in your body without pressure to perform, improve or become anything

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  • What is restorative yoga?

    What is restorative yoga?

    From the moment you walk in to the moment you leave, a restorative yoga class is about nurturing a sense of safety in your own body. Props like blocks and blankets are used to fully support you and enable you to rest deeply in poses often for an extended time. It’s a gentle, passive practice promoting deep relaxation by inviting you to slow down and allow the nervous system to settle

    One of the reasons I started doing yoga was that I wanted to be able to do a press up. I thought that yoga arms could save me from upper body strength embarrassment.

    After months of bicep strengthening classes, yoga gave me what I had asked for. I performed my new single press up capability that Christmas to bemused twin nephews who were polite enough to give me a round of applause. Four year olds are the best!

    Until then I thought all ‘yoga’ was the same so I was deeply confused the first time I went to a restorative yoga class. There were no powerful warrior poses or gravity defying crows or scary headstands (which I can’t do anyway because of the slipped discs in my neck).

    Instead we were invited to gather blocks and bolsters and blankets and then basically drape ourselves over them for several minutes at a time. I thought it must be a joke. Lying down in different positions for an hour? This is the best thing ever!

    I continued going to ‘regular’ classes (those biceps weren’t going to keep impressing 4 year olds by themselves!) but would sneak in a restorative practice almost as a guilty pleasure, as if physical relaxation was something I wasn’t really allowed to do.

    In the years since that magnificent first glorified napping session I’ve experienced some big emotional as well as physical shocks and I’ve turned to restorative yoga as a way of providing intensive care for my nervous system.

    Lying down and resting doesn’t always come easily to me. Not because I don’t like lying down. I love lying down. But if something doesn’t look like work or effort, I feel like I’m breaking the rules.

    I’ve called myself lazy and tried to force and shame myself back into a more active practice.

    I’ve told myself ‘there’s something wrong with me’ for not being able to ‘just get on the mat’. But being mean to myself hasn’t worked very well. Apparently my nervous system doesn’t like being called lazy.

    I’m recovering (as I think we all are in our own way) from difficult life stuff

    My body wants to lie down

    My heart wants to feel cared for by stillness

    Right now the yoga that gave me the mighty press up isn’t the yoga my nervous system wants me to do.

    The yoga my nervous system wants me to do is restorative.

    I’ve learnt that I don’t need restorative yoga as ‘just relaxation’ but as time to be with the ‘me’ who has survived difficult things, the ‘me’ who sometimes wakes up tired, as well as the ‘me’ who secretly still wants to be Diana Ross.

    It’s also for the ‘me’ who wants to share this slow, gentle practice with a little community in this new place that I’m starting to call home.

    If restorative yoga sounds like it might be for you, please join me on Tuesday 22nd September or get in touch to ask any questions or talk about your yoga needs

    If it’s right for you, I look forward to welcoming you soon!

    Photo by Rudra Gupta on Pexels.com

  • What does ‘listen to your body’ even mean?

    ‘Listen to your body’

    ‘Focus on your breath’

    ‘Take a deep inhale’

    You glance around the room and everyone else seems to be inhaling deeply and ‘hearing’ their body say clever things.

    But if you live in a body that has experienced harm or that works differently from what you’ve been told is ‘normal’, or you’re experiencing depression or anxiety, taking a deep breath may not be available to you right away. It might not feel good to you right now. You might not know whether it feels good. And not knowing might feel bad.

    A lot of the time when I ‘listen to my body’, my body says ‘no thanks, leave me alone’

    We hear ‘listen to your body’ all the time in yoga and wellness. But what does that actually mean when you’re not sure what you’re feeling? When your body has learned to override its signals? When ‘what feels good’ becomes another instruction you’re supposed to get right?

    There can be all sorts of reasons that mean instructions like ‘listen to your body’ make you feel alienated from a yoga class and you should never feel alienated from yoga.

    Yoga is for everyone.

    So in case it’s helpful, here’s my interpretation of what ‘listening to your body’ means and how it can be done in a slow and gentle way…

    One way I think about yoga is as becoming more skilful in relating to your nervous system: noticing some of the signals of safety, danger, activation and settling that are happening in the background all the time

    And I’d break tuning into these signals down into 3 sub skills:

    1. Interoception – noticing the sensations in the body: do you feel comfort, discomfort or numbness right now?
    2. Non violence – notice if you get angry, upset, disappointed with yourself if the sensations you pick up are not what you expected or wanted; notice if you’re forcing yourself to try and feel differently; remind yourself ‘I can leave at any time if this starts feeling too intense or I get overwhelmed’
    3. Noticing patterns (without immediately trying to change them) – are you holding your breath? Bracing your belly? Clenching your jaw? Hunching your shoulders? And then go back to point 2: can you notice stress patterns in your body without getting angry with yourself for not sitting straight enough or breathing deeply enough?

    Whatever your response to any of these questions, you haven’t failed at yoga. Asking the question is yoga.

    You actually won at yoga!

    Yoga is about cultivating a friendly environment for comfort, discomfort and numbness, for chronic breath holders as well as olympic deep breathers. It’s about gently allowing you to be with a body that feels uneasy or wound up or scared, never forcing, going at your own pace.

    Sometimes the body isn’t the long arms and strong legs warrior pose against a sunset that you see on Instagram.

    Sometimes the body is a frightened animal.

    My body is a rescue chihuahua. Ready to quake with fear at any moment and yappy when she doesn’t get her own way.

    So if you’re invited to “listen to your body” and find nothing or discomfort or confusion. Or you look around and think everyone else is peacefully communing with their body while you can’t even feel yours, you haven’t done yoga wrong.

    Noticing that it feels weird, uncomfortable, inaccessible or unsettling is listening.

    You just listened to your body.

    And she’s a body worth listening to too.

  • What if yoga didn’t have to be something you were good at?

    I first approached yoga as something to master:

    I will be the bendiest me. I will know all the sequences. I will look like a pro.

    I bought a Jane Middlemiss DVD (it was 2006!) and copied sequences into a notebook then memorised and tried to re enact them on my own. I even did a sun salutation on the beach. You’re not a real yogini until there’s photographic evidence of you doing cobra by an ocean, right? Wet sand smeared all over my front like peanut butter. I was glad Instagram hadn’t been invented yet.

    For a very long time, I performed yoga.

    I’d heard about the harmony and namasté of it all but when I went to classes to try and channel love and light, instead of just competing with myself, I competed with my unsuspecting classmates. I appeared to honour the light within but really I wanted my warrior pose to be the best warrior pose. I wanted my ujayyi breath to be the deepest ujayyi breath. I was basically Donald Trump in leggings.

    When the teacher said ‘notice your breath’ I thought ‘yeh, everyone, notice my breath!’

    The yoga maniac in my head meant that I didn’t actually enjoy yoga. I just wanted to be ‘good’ at it.

    Like in other areas of my life I thought being uncomfortably flexible, pushing myself beyond my limits, getting into complicated postures were a way to be ‘good’. And being ‘good’ was a way to feel like I mattered.

    When I went through an emotional shock last year, I did what any self respecting perfectionist does in a crisis: perform being good at something. I threw myself into yoga. Violently.

    FINISH YOUR TEACHER TRAINING COURSE! Inner Donald Trump bellowed.

    And I obeyed. I went to 26 classes in 21 days. I read books like a machine and wrote essays like a robot.

    But as soon as I got my certificate I stopped. Yoga became terrifying. It was confusing. What’s so scary about sitting on a mat? I’ve got a piece of paper that says I’m good at this! Except that certificates don’t know how it feels to be afraid of your own thoughts. Certificates don’t know what it’s like to feel unsafe in your own body.

    Several months after I got my precious yoga teacher training certificate, I found myself rolling out my turquoise mat, surrounding it with pillows and blankets and lying down. I don’t know how long I stayed in my yoga fort but it was light outside when I lay down and dark when I got up.

    I let lying down be enough. I didn’t try to be good at it.

    The relentless voice in my head telling me ‘you have to do it better’ had had a nap. And a radical question bubbled to the surface…

    what if you don’t have to be ‘good’ at yoga?

    What if

    • you don’t have to be flexible
    • you don’t have to push
    • you don’t have to perform
    • you don’t have to arrive knowing what your body needs
    • you can be rather than do

    Of course the Commander in Chief still makes an uninvited appearance now and then but it turns out that uninvited doesn’t mean unwelcome. Part of me will always want to be ‘good’ at things and that’s ok.

    One of the lessons’ of yoga for me is that although there’s a part that wants to know I’m doing things ‘right’, there’s also a part that needs to not always be trying so hard, a part that wants to lie down and sink into the earth. No poses, no special breathing, just messy old me.

    And there’s room for all of that on the mat.

    Do you fancy giving restorative yoga a go?
    My restorative yoga classes are a space to explore this slower, less performative approach to yoga. You don’t need to be flexible, experienced or “good” at yoga. You just need to bring yourself.
    If you’d like to know more or just have a chat about your yoga needs, please drop me a message or book a class below

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