Ep 127: Why Traditional Restorative Yoga Isn't for Everyone

As yoga teachers, we were initially trained to think of restorative yoga as the gentle, accessible option, the class option to send students who are struggling. But for students managing anxiety or chronic pain, traditional restorative practice can be challenging, and sometimes counterproductive. Understanding why certain nervous systems resist stillness, and what to offer when they do, is one of the most practical skills you can develop. This episode challenges the assumption that restorative yoga is universally calming and gives you concrete alternatives to use with students whose nervous systems need a different approach.

You'll learn:

• Why Restorative Yoga Doesn't Always Regulate the Nervous System
• What Happens with Students in Chronic Pain
• Where Teachers Get It Wrong
• Five Alternatives That Actually Work

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Transcript

Monica 0:00

Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Monica, and I'm so glad you're here. Here, we talk about the anatomy, the injuries, the nervous system insights, plus all the real-life knowledge you wish had been included in your yoga teacher training. There is a belief that restorative yoga is the gentle option, and restorative yoga is where you send the student who is struggling. Do you believe that? I used to believe that because I thought that restorative yoga is safe, it's calming, and it's universally accessible to anyone who needs to slow down. And if a student is anxious or in chronic pain or feeling overwhelmed, restorative yoga is gonna be exactly what they need. This belief was taught to us in teacher trainings and studio culture, and the message got repeated until it felt like it was true, like it was a fact. And most of us were never taught to question it, and I wasn't either, not at first. But here's what I know now. For some students, specifically students living with anxiety and students managing chronic pain, traditional restorative yoga can actually make things worse for them, not because the practice is poorly designed, but because the nervous system of these particular students does not respond to stillness the way we assume that it will. this episode is about understanding why and what to offer these students instead. If this challenges what you learned in your training, that's okay. This is relatively new territory in how yoga and nervous system science are being brought together, and most teacher trainings honestly haven't caught up to modern understanding yet. You were taught a model that made sense with the information available. Now, there's more information, and we get to think differently. the model most of us were taught is essentially this: a slower practice, longer holds, supported poses, dim lighting, and a quiet room equals nervous system regulation. And for many students, that is exactly what happens. For a student whose nervous system can move fluidly between states, who can feel activated and then settle, who can be still without that stillness becoming distressing, restorative yoga is genuinely profound for them. It works. It gives them a practice that they can come to whenever it's needed. The problem is that we started applying that model universally without asking whether everybody's nervous system responds the same way, and they do not. When a student with anxiety comes to a restorative class and is asked to lie still, to be quiet, and to hold a supported pose for five or 10 minutes, something very specific can begin to happen. Their mind, no longer occupied by movement or instruction, starts to generate. Thoughts accelerate, the silence starts to become loud, and the stillness that is supposed to feel restoring starts to feel threatening because an anxious nervous system does not read stillness as safety. It reads stillness as an opportunity to scan for danger. is often how they regulate. Movement gives their nervous system something to track, it gives the mind a task, and it keeps their body engaged in a way that prevents the spiral that can happen when there is nothing else to focus on. When you take that movement away and ask them to simply be still and breathe, you're removing their I had a student who would fidget constantly in Shavasana every class without fail. She was not being disruptive. She was not ignoring my Shavasana cues. She was simply coping. Her nervous system was telling her that being completely still felt unsafe and her body was responding to that signal. Her fidgeting was not her failing to relax. It was her system trying to find its way back to a manageable state. And what do many yoga teachers do when they notice this? They ask the student to be still. They cue it again. They gently encourage the student to surrender. But what that student actually needs is not more encouragement to do the thing her nervous system is resisting. She needs a different approach entirely. Students living with chronic pain present a different but related challenge in restorative yoga, and it's worth discussing so you understand why. When someone is managing ongoing pain, their nervous system is often operating in a heightened state of vigilance. The brain has been doing the job of monitoring the body for threat, and it has become very good at it. This is not a character flaw or a sign of weakness. It's exactly what a nervous system that has been living with pain is supposed to do. The protection response ramps up. The threshold for what gets flagged as dangerous lowers and their system is primed. Now, put that student in a restorative pose, long holds, still, quiet, body supported in a position they are now being asked to stay in for eight to ten, maybe fifteen minutes, and a few things can happen. Sensations that might be neutral in a moving body become amplified by sustained attention on them. A mild ache that would have been managed through a little bit of movement in a flow class becomes a central focus in a still pose. The prolonged hold in a single position can feel like pressure or discomfort or even pain, and the nervous system that is already vigilant has no difficulty interpreting that as a threat. The student who is supposed to be resting ends up gripping, bracing, or mentally working very hard to stay in the pose because getting out of the pose feels like they're failing at the class or they're not following your instruction. I also saw this clearly in my group classes when I was teaching in a gym environment. Students of different ages, different histories with pain, different relationships to their bodies. When I watched older students in particular navigate what I thought were gentle restorative poses, I could see the processing happening, not relaxation. It was them kinda efforting, and the poses they were in were not asking for effort, but their nervous systems were supplying it anyway because stillness felt like something to manage rather than something they could simply receive. There are two patterns I see most often when yoga teachers work with these students in restorative settings, and both of them come from a good place, but both of them kinda miss the mark. The first is continuing to cue stillness when the student clearly cannot get there. The student is shifting, adjusting, looking uncomfortable, and the teacher keeps inviting them to settle, to soften, to surrender. But you cannot cue someone into nervous system regulation when their nervous system has assessed the situation as unsafe. The cue does not reach the part of the brain that is running the show. You need to change the approach, not increase the number of times that you ask them to relax. They simply cannot. The second is not offering enough support. Students in chronic pain and students with anxiety often need more physical support than a typical restorative setup provides, not because they're fragile, but because the felt sense of being held by something concrete helps their nervous system read the situation as safe. A bolster positioned a few inches away from the body does not communicate the same thing as a bolster that is actually making full, firm contact with their bodies. Props that they can touch give the nervous system something real to orient to. When teachers set up restorative poses without enough props or with props that are not quite making contact with the student The student who most needs that support, they are left floating in a sensation of unsupported openness that their nervous systems cannot settle into. So what do you actually do? Here are some approaches that tend to work for students whose nervous systems struggle with traditional restorative practices. The first option is gentle, continuous movement. For students with anxiety especially, slow rhythmic movement, a gentle rocking in child's pose, slow flowing cat cow without holds, This gives their nervous system something to track without demanding stillness. their pace is slow, you invite them to connect with their breath, and there's movement. There's something for their mind to follow. This thread of gentle motion can be more genuinely regulating than a held pose for these students. The second is what I think of as grounded short holds. Rather than asking for five to eight or maybe even fifteen-minute holds typical of restorative yoga, you offer supported shapes held for thirty to ninety seconds with permission while you give them permission to adjust freely and transition as they need. The emphasis shifts from staying to exploring and noticing what feels best for them. The student is not committed to the pose for a set time duration their nervous system is not ready for. They can try the shape, feel what it offers, and move on Without feeling like transitioning out of the pose is them doing something wrong. The third is active breathwork as its own practice. Pranayama practices that give the mind a specific task, counting the breath, following a ratio, physically feeling the movement of the rib cage, offer the regulatory benefits of breathwork without requiring the body to be passive and still. The breath itself becomes the movement. For students with anxiety or chronic pain, having something to actively participate in during breathwork rather than simply observing the breath, often produces far more regulated outcomes than passive lying down breath awareness. The fourth is progressive awareness cues. Rather than asking a student to surrender into stillness, you invite them to move their awareness through specific parts of their body one at a time. Not a full-on guided meditation, just a traveling internal attention that keeps their mind gently occupied while the body gets the rest it needs. you're giving their analytical mind a job, which helps to quiet the vigilant scanning that they've got going on while their body moves towards ease. and the fifth is simply permission to move within the pose. When you explicitly tell students that adjusting, shifting, or coming out of a pose is always available to them, and that there is no goal of perfect stillness, you remove the nervous system's need to brace against the discomfort of feeling trapped. Students who know they can move tend to move less. It's the constraint itself that often drives the feeling of restlessness. Understanding how the nervous system responds to stillness in students with anxiety and chronic pain is not a niche, like, piece of knowledge for a specialized teacher to know. This is foundational information. These students are in your classes right now and when restorative yoga doesn't work for them, when they fidget, when they seem unable to settle, when they leave class looking more activated than when they arrived, the most common interpretation they have is that they didn't try hard enough or that yoga isn't for them or that something is wrong with them and they did the restorative class wrong. None of those things are true. You know that, I know that. What is true is that we're offering them a practice that doesn't fit their nervous system and we need more tools in our toolkit to help them in class. I teach a much deeper and more nuanced understanding of the nervous system including how to read what is happening in a student's body, how to sequence in ways that support regulation, and how to build practices that meet students where their nervous systems actually are inside my Teaching Students with Injuries mentorship. If this episode piqued an interest for you and you want to understand the nervous system at a level that genuinely changes how you teach, that is the place to go deeper. You can learn more about the mentorship at the link in the show notes below. And if you're curious about whether it's the right fit for you and where you are in your teaching right now, I offer strategy calls where we can talk through exactly that. I'll link that in the show notes as well. What I want you to take away from this episode is not that restorative yoga is wrong or that you have been teaching it incorrectly. What I want you to take away is that everyone's nervous system is not the same. It has its own history and we shouldn't assume that a student can and is able to do what we're asking. But that's where our expertise as teachers watching our students comes in. Some students need to be met differently and now you know some of how to do that I hope this episode helped you think about how you plan your classes, what classes you suggest for students, and if you're really serving your students with what you're teaching in your classes. If you're enjoying these episodes, please leave a review and share it with another yoga teacher. Okay, thank you so much for being here. Don't forget to check out the mentorship information and set up a strategy call just so we can talk about where you are in your teaching journey. Okay, I'll see you next week. bye.