The pandemic has been very intense for us all. The affects will be felt and studied for years to come including Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). PTSD can happen after a deeply threatening or scary event. Even if you weren’t directly involved, the shock of what happened can be so great that you have a hard time living a normal life. People with PTSD can have insomnia, flashbacks, low self-esteem, and a lot of painful or unpleasant emotions.

As the name suggests, restorative yoga restores the body to its parasympathetic nervous system function, which, in turn, helps the body rest, heal, and restore balance. By allowing time for longer poses and deeper breathing, restorative yoga helps elicit the relaxation response.

You might be surprised at how the sciences, and integrative practices like yoga (related to health and disease) are evolving. Our understanding of the relationships between nerves, muscles, fascia, organs, and perception is expanding.

We all feel how spending time in beautiful places (real, remembered, or imagined) improves our sense of well-being. Many of us have also experienced similar contentment on our yoga mats. We’ve also felt relief from physical pain and dysfunction, emotional hurt, social disconnection, and spiritual confusion. Research is increasingly affirming our lived experience with yoga to effectively self-manage conditions such as chronic pain, and to improve our senses of vitality, safety, and integration.

The vagus nerve, along with other structures and mechanisms, creates a wide spectrum of feelings that prompt the body’s systems to turn up, turn down, and even turn off various responses.

Also, are you exhausted? Most of us know without a shadow of doubt that we feel better when we sleep consistently and rest regularly. Rather than relying on exhaustion-induced naps or passive diversions often mistaken for rest, we can use specific sequences of restorative yoga poses to create niches for our nervous systems to get in sync and slow down. Restorative yoga can calm a racing mind and relieve mental fog and fatigue.

Please join me for Gentle and Restorative Yoga Tuesdays 11-12:15 at Yoga for Today in Sherwood Park.