Restorative and pranayama sessions are vital for your regular Iyengar yoga, offering lots of benefits for practitioners. In our fast-paced lives, these practices provide a much-needed opportunity to rejuvenate and find balance. Restorative poses promote deep relaxation, allowing the body to heal and restore its natural vitality. Pranayama cultivates mindfulness and calms the mind, enhancing focus and inner awareness. Through the practice of pranayama, we create a harmonious synergy, integrating body, breath, and mind. Restorative sessions allow us to surrender and let go, while pranayama sessions help us reconnect to our life force. In Iyengar yoga, these practices become transformative gateways to self-discovery and well-being and can lead us to new depths in our practice.
This session is about being genuine in our restorative and pranayama practice.
During this class, we’ll stay in poses for a little longer than usual. This will give us time and space to check in with ourselves every step of the way. We’ll be encouraged to observe what we experience in a pose, and coming out of it, we’ll pay attention to the quality of the breath, to the sensations in the body, being present and honest with ourselves.
This session is also about sequencing and noting the benefits that a properly sequenced set of poses can bring, and how it can help us to become more inwardly focused in a restorative class. When performing poses from the same asana type, five is typically seen as the magic number. The first poses come harder, they are still a bit of a challenge and we’re usually to focused on overcoming this challenge to focus on the actual pose and what it brings. After the third or fourth pose in a sequence, though, we start to get into the groove of things, really feel the energy of the asana type. The same goes for poses we hold for longer periods of time, like in a restorative session. When we first settle into it, it might be difficult to remain present. We might be a little distracted. But if we stay long enough, we will eventually begin to switch our awareness on and move our attention inwards.
Video stills from this sequence
