Relaxation Workshop Recap

Thanks to all who came out and made today’s workshop such a success – everyone was right on key the whole way through.

In a nutshell today’s session focused on relaxation and how to achieve it – in all realms of life, on and off that mat. The central idea being that the mind is the starting point of any kind of relaxation experience – it must stem from the mind. A well-trained and balanced mind can then maintain equipoise in even the most challenging scenarios.

So then what did we do today? We started out with a supine meditation / yoga nidra (15 – 20 min) to withdraw all our faculties inwards and gain a sense of psychic release and tranquillity.  Through this contemplative exploration, we established a direction of where we wanted to go.

We transitioned to seating breathing and came to a point of discourse – what is is relaxation, how do we identify it and how do achieve and maintain it. From this short discussion we segued into actual poses.

For the next hour or more we experimented with and discovered positions of comfort through modified restorative poses. We kept everything on the simpler side so that we could all easily re-create these poses in our own home. In this section everyone got opportunity to try variations and experience the benefits. Here the chief aim was to experiment and experience and come up with a few poses (1, 2, 3) that can become “go to” poses for easy and efficient periods of release and relaxation at home.

After this aspect of physical postures we delved again into the purely psychic arena with meditation and pranayama. Here we investigated the effect of ideation and how it enhances our mental state or quality. That was one major theme of the workshop: That essentially relaxation and reprieve is a psychic phenomenon, not purely a physical one. Physical tools can help, but to recondition there must be a psychic shift.

In the end we closed out with shavasana / yoga nidra. At this point, we all had opportunity to incorporate all the tools of the trade and bring things to a natural conclusion.

All in all, a great team assembled for the session and I felt we definitely touched on some key points that will be helpful – expect to see this type of seminar come round again soon!

Following are participant responses to the best part of the seminar was:

– Realize I have the power to shift my reality to a better place.

– Learning different physical postures for relaxation.

– Delving deep.

– Trying the poses and making them work for each one with variations + learning the techniques of breathing.

Great having everyone out for the session!!