Gentle Nourishing Yoga 4:00

August - RESILIENCE

For the month of August, Susan Whitaker's Gentle Yoga class will be exploring Resilience as a theme. The dictionary defines resilience as " tending to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change." Yoga provides many ways to develop skills to recover your inner strength when life hands you a challenge. We will  learn strength through balance poses, softness through honoring the heart,  flexibility through spinal movements, ease through breathing techniques, and stability from extended concentration.  

This yoga class offers a gentle form of yoga and includes restful, restorative postures using props such as the wall, blankets or bolster pillows. With this, we teach breathing practices to build lung strength, and some standing and seated poses for stability and balance. All of these have been shown to reduce stress and discomfort.

We know that students are often in different stages of treatment and recovery, so the movements are simple enough that we can accommodate most physical challenges, and deep enough to engage them both mentally and emotionally. The movements are done in chairs or sitting on the floor, standing, or lying down. We generally begin with easy postures and progress to using more of the large muscles of the body, emphasizing range of motion, increased circulation, stimulation of the lymphatic system, and expanded breathing. Each class ends with a restful, floor relaxation.

This class is most suited for people who have a degree of physical stability and can get up and down from the floor. People with bone cancer are discouraged from practicing due to the possibility of discomfort or injury.