I love yoga. Or maybe I just love the idea of yoga. I did some yoga when I was younger, when I was more active, before I spent my days sitting in a cubicle in front of a computer. Now I think about getting back to it. But mostly I get intimidated and just continue not doing yoga. So when I saw Restorative Yoga for Beginners, I thought maybe this was exactly what I need to get back into it.
Author Julia Clarke has been teaching restorative yoga for years and has all the information you need to get started on a restorative yoga practice. The poses she offers aren’t taxing or painful. They are designed to allow your body to rest, supported by blocks and blankets, so that the tension and stress of everyday life can melt away. Restorative yoga can lower blood pressure, relieve some chronic pain, help you breathe better, improve digestion, and even help with anxiety and depression.
These are poses literally anyone can do. The most basic pose is a modified corpse pose, where you lie still on the ground and let your body realign itself. The pose here, Basic Relaxation Pose, is where you lie on a mat on the floor, your head and knees supported by blankets, and stay like that for 20-30 minutes. Who can’t do that? (Okay, there may be those with back pain or women who are pregnant who would struggle, but there are other equally relaxing poses that can be used instead).
Where most yoga types focus on stretching, flexibility, building muscles, building the core, building up to difficult and bendy poses, restorative yoga focuses on relaxing and undoing all the knots that our daily stresses tie us in. With well over 30 poses that can be mixed and matched, Restorative Yoga for Beginners offers countless possibilities for pain and stress relief. And if you don’t want to come up with your own sequence of poses, Clarke offers up 19 sequences of her own, most from 30 minutes to 80 minutes, that you can use as is to feel better or modify to fit your needs.
Yoga can be intimidating, but restorative yoga was designed to allow anyone to come and discover the benefits of this type of self-care. With just some simple props (a mat, some blankets and pillows, maybe a couple of blocks) and a quiet room, you too can use these gentle poses to quiet your mind, let your stress seep out of your muscles, breathe deeply, living with less pain, improve your emotional well-being, and lower your stress hormones. This is my goal for 2020—to lie on the floor and improve my health through relaxation.
A copy of Restorative Yoga for Beginners was provided to me by Rockridge Press through the Callisto Publisher’s Club, with many thanks.