Yoga What

My mom is trying out some mild yoga practices for the first time and has encouraged me to join her over the last week. The yoga practices I'm referring to aren't typical stretching and active pose holding; the purpose of Restorative Yoga (Yoga Nidra) is to deeply relax your body and being. I've never attempted any kind of yoga before, so I felt that maybe this is a good place to start? Yoga Nidra basically involves lying on pillows with blankets over you and closing your eyes during a visualization exercise that is probably a bit like hypnotism in suggesting your body to relax.

This particular session I guess was different from the instructor's other sessions. She told us to bring awareness to each part of our body and to actively think about tension there and let it go. If I didn't attend the yoga class and experience this myself, I wouldn't have believed that anything would really happen... but to me, some moments of this "exercise" were really intense. She started out bringing us to our fingers, up our arms, our toes, up our legs, up our pelvis and torso, then through the head. When she finished talking about the limbs, she would say, "Now your arms are like a fallen tree branch, detached and at peace." I didn't really start feeling quite like that, at least not until she started going through the stomach. My limbs had been completely still for so long that I no longer felt that they were even there, as if I were completely dismembered, but not in a scary way.

Then when she brought awareness to our hearts, I realized I couldn't feel mine beating anymore, and I wasn't sure if that was supposed to happen or not. I was a bit weirded out. Immediately at her mention of the "emotional heart" I started feeling this flood of emotions welling up in my chest, and when she said to "release it" there was this huge surge of... FEELINGS going up my shoulder and down my side, and I started choking back the tears that began welling up in my eyes. I have no idea what that was about, but it was one of the most intense experiences I've ever had.

During the exercise, I was very relaxed, but as she counted down to a more awake state, I started feeling the pains and tension in my body again. So, I'm not sure if I can say the session helped me or not if I was only relaxed during the class itself.

Since I got an unlimited 2 week introductory pass, I'm going to try a few more yoga classes to see how they fare with me. For some reason, my mom is really proud that I went with her and feels that based on my reactions to the class I should definitely continue.