In this advanced restorative session, after a relatively intense asana practice with a focus on inversions, we settle in for about an hour of contemplation in more static, less strenuous poses aimed at grounding us and bringing more awareness to our practice.
This session is all about softening, letting go of tension, and releasing into a pose. It is also about increasing capacity by becoming unstuck, realising that the reason we feel stuck in the first place is that we are, consciously or subconsciously, blocking our energy channels, or simply not performing the pose with full awareness. Our aim in this class is to restore awareness to our practice and by doing so to unlock our ability to move deeper, to express ourselves more fully in the pose.
The more we practise, the more we repeat certain poses, even sequences of poses. This is one of the main reasons we become dull in our practice. But we should instead use this familiarity with poses as an opportunity to ask ourselves every time: What am I doing? What is this useful for? What will happen if I do this instead of this? By asking this every time we repeat a pose, we will start to see that no matter how much we repeat certain poses, they are never quite the same, the answers to these questions always differ a little.
Video stills from this sequence
