4 Benefits of Gentle Yoga
Four of the main benefits of gentle Yoga, and why it’s an essential antidote for our fast-paced, stressed-out lives.
1. Gentle Yoga helps us cultivate the skill of conscious relaxation.
A gentle Yoga is a more restorative style of Yoga, as opposed to more Yang styles that involves a faster pace of movement. Gentle Yoga uses long-held, supported postures to create the conditions for us to cultivate the skill of conscious relaxation and most importantly to release unnecessary habitual tension in the body and mind. For many of us, many other Yoga practices can easily become another opportunity to over-effort or get caught up in accomplishing or striving to get better at a pose. Gentle Yoga is about, “How can I focus on my breathe? How can I let my body and mind unwind? What is enough?”
2. Gentle Yoga helps us discover where we are holding tension.
Much of the effort involved in Gentle Yoga is the willingness to look at how and where we are holding tension and to relax our body and mind, allowing the breath to come in more, so the tension that we find can be softened or less gripping. Discovering where and how we hold tension helps us find room for change, so that tension won’t limit our physical, emotional, and mental wellness and our comfort in our body.
We tend to favor activities that ask us to use our muscular body, but we are already doing that all day. In Gentle Yoga we use gentle and often prop supported postures to help us travel inside, then if we find we are still holding on too tightly somewhere in the body or mind, we work to relax in the next breath. This creates deep release and ease in the body and teaches us how we keep working and doing even when it’s not necessary, so we go back into our regular activities in more articulate and wise ways.
3. Gentle Yoga creates the conditions for the relaxation response to kick in.
The grounding, complete, and deep breathing of Gentle Yoga help us elicit the relaxation response, a neurological response that tells us we are safe, pulls us out of “flight or fight” mode, and initiates the body’s self-healing process. We switch over from worrying about staying “safe” to fostering the longevity systems of longterm health, including digestion, elimination, reproduction, growth and repair, and immunity.
4. Gentle Yoga helps us face what we are avoiding about ourselves.
Most of us are programmed to “do” a lot—it keeps us engaged and makes us feel productive and in control. But our habit of running around, conquering our to-do lists, and fueling ourselves with coffee and ambition can often be a way we avoid deep discomforts and unwelcome feelings in the body and mind. Gentle Yoga asks us to stop engaging in all the doing and face what we really need to look at about ourselves. To learn about, befriend, and care for the whole of ourselves in a way we are not used to. This is an essential step for health and healing, for true renewal. A lot of people think relaxing is about letting go, but rather than throwing out, we are trying to make space for what’s uncomfortable and to allow more space for the full experience of who we are.
