What Surfaces When the Body Settles?

Restorative yoga is quiet. 

However, it can make your mind loud. Especially if you’re unaccustomed to the sound of silence. 

If your mind can be as scary of a place as mine can be at times, you might flee from this healing modality, even if slowing down is what your body and mind desperately need. Knowing what to expect can help you navigate mental minefields and get closer to Zen. 

Hello Darkness, My Old Friend 

Talking to your mat can bring back painful memories. It can also spur future fears. Here’s how to handle both scenarios. 

Rumination

Dark thoughts can arise when you spend quiet time talking to your mat. You might ruminate over past hurts, mistakes you have made, or things you wish you had done differently. 

Think of that word: rumination. To me, it brings to mind a cow and its cud, chewing over the same material again and again to make it digestible. Which, ironically, is a mental image that helps me deal with this flavor of dark thought. 

You can’t change the past. Your brain knows this. Your subconscious doesn’t keep bringing up old wounds in hopes that you’ve invented a time machine. 

However, you can get curious. Your mat is the perfect place to ask yourself: What lesson(s) can I learn from this experience. 

Every experience, no matter whether we label it good, bad, exhilarating, or horrific, contains a lesson. Instead of continuing to beat yourself up for mistakes you can’t go back and change, explore the circumstances surrounding the event mindfully, including your attitude and the beliefs you had at the time. What could you control? What was beyond your ability to change? How can you use this knowledge in the here and now to avoid similar suffering in the future? 

Future Fears

I won’t lie any longer: this world and the people in it terrify me. Why are we still at war? Why aren’t we doing more to address climate change? Why don’t we slow down and collectively heal before insisting on more dubious “progress?” I want to scream at the sky almost daily. 

However, I still love life and find value and joy in it, which means I have to find some way to manage my constant anxiety. 

One thing I have learned the hard way is that focusing on issues way too large for any one person to tackle alone starts the pendulum swinging. You know, the one that goes directly from “take immediate, if rash, action” at one end to “complete and utter paralysis” on the other. 

Your mat is, however, the perfect place for asking yourself what you can do. The four pillars of agency are a solid framework when wrestling with the “what can I do” question. 

Play a game of, “If-then” while holding longer restorative poses. Ask yourself: If I take this action, what are X things that could possibly happen as a result? How would I then deal with each of those outcomes? 

This quiet time allows you uninterrupted space to think through difficult dilemmas, playing out various scenarios mentally before implementing them, especially if you can practice with a group or in a private studio where you aren’t interrupted by kids or other family members. After all, you are technically exercising, which should convince any critics that you are using your time productively, not just sitting around waiting to be saddled with another to-do-this-minute.

Are We There Yet? I’m Bored 

Boredom is another experience that can transform restorative yoga from “aah” to “argh,” but fortunately, it’s easier to manage than dark thoughts. 

Notice 

The easiest boredom buster I’ve found is to simply notice what’s going on in my body as I hold each pose. How does each breath help you surrender more deeply into each passive pose? How does a slight shift in body position or the addition of a pillow, bolster, towel or block change the effect the pose has on how you feel? 

Better yet, practice becoming The Observer. Step outside your thoughts, noticing them as you might view twigs and other bits of debris flowing past you in a river. Don’t bend over the stream to pick any of them up and examine them more closely. Just notice. What does the mere act of observation reveal? 

This technique is, admittedly, a 180-degree turn from the rumination advice of searching for the lesson in past experiences, but you can use it for the same purpose. Sometimes, events have too much of an emotional charge for you to see the lesson at first. Simply noticing teaches your nervous system that feelings alone will not hurt you, empowering you to sit with them in stillness instead of seeking potentially harmful distractions. 

Listen 

Becoming a card-carrying member of the single-earbud gang has perhaps been the best part of my late autism diagnosis, inspiring my next, admittedly highly unorthodox, tip: Listen. 

I did this when I first began talking to my mat in earnest, before Ed and I even began developing Only in Sedona Yoga. I had to do something with the time I formerly filled up with drinking, even though it only consisted of an hour or so before falling asleep. I started practicing restorative yoga in bed while listening to lectures from licensed therapists, as I still lacked access to such care at the time. 

If you choose this route, choose your auditory input carefully. These days, I opt for relaxing music, water/rain sounds or both (I’ve even started playing with Garage Band in hopes of composing my own yoga music someday, although learning new apps is a hard trick for this old dog).

Learning a new language? Maybe listen to a story in that tongue to acclimate yourself to the rhythm and syntax, even if you don’t understand all the words. In school? Restorative yoga can double as study time, especially if people don’t interrupt you as often when you’re on the mat. 

A Gentle Caveat

Admittedly, there are yoga purists who would cringe at the idea of problem-solving or listening to lectures on the mat. I’m not going to argue that their ideas lack merit. I simply assert that my methods work, or at least worked for me, in the real world. Sometimes, active mental engagement is the stepping stone that eventually allows your nervous system to feel safe enough to embrace the stillness and silence, and guess what? That’s okay. 

Let the Silence Speak 

Eventually, you may find that tools like your earbud or mental rubrics like the four pillars no longer serve you, or only come in handy sometimes. Every day of practice is different, and yoga isn’t a competition or a hierarchy—there’s no “leveling up” or “doing it better.” Your time on the mat is uniquely your own. 

There is something magical, however, in simply being in silence, content with nothing but the poses and the stillness in your physical self. Perhaps it's just me and my lifetime of anxiety speaking, but having a spot to simply exist without expectations is, in itself, a little oasis of perfection in an imperfect world. 

A time may come when you want nothing more than to sink into your mat and let the silence speak to you. Whether that’s today or you use one of the above suggestions, knowing how to navigate what happens in your mind when your body settles can transform your restorative yoga practice.