How Restorative Yoga Changed My Life
Plus, how to find self-connection and sleep.
“Can you create distance between you and the urge to move?” Asks Breanna, my yoga instructor, as we lie on the ground with blocks and bolsters supporting our bodies. What a loaded question, if only she knew. For two years now, I’ve been trying to rehabilitate my relationship to movement by, ironically, moving as little as possible. For years, I used exercise as my therapy—except it was a deceptive type of therapy, rather than heal it acted as a means of dissociation.
“Perhaps the urge to move is the mind’s way of distracting you from what you’re experiencing,” says Jamie, our yoga instructor in another restorative class. Ain’t that the truth.
Whatever emotion I was facing, movement was always the salve. Grief anger? I’d sprint to Florence and the Machine in the winter, the frigid air freezing my knuckles to a numbness that transcended my whole body. Grief sadness? I’d turn the hurt in the pit of my stomach into an ab flex in a plank; a physical pain transfor…