Transformational, inner cosmicmorphisis (I think I just made that one up!).  Two words to describe what we have observed in you, our students, as you practice Restorative Yoga.  Whether it is in the way you transition into a pose now, or how your breath is more regulated and deep, or there is less fidgeting; a  change has occurred.  Perhaps there are some other areas off the mat, in your life that have changed while you’ve been practicing restorative yoga.  Major shifts can occur when you practice yoga and meditation.  The changes begin within you and then surface externally in relationship, job, home and lifestyle shifts.  I found a great article from Yoga Journal on Navigating Change with the seven core yogic teachings to guide you through change (see below).  Use your journal to write down any responses and/or intentions (sankalpa) to this self-inquiry.


The Breath
Awareness of the wavelike quality of your breath.  Feel the inflow as a wave rolls into the shore and the breath moving out like the receding current of water from the shore. Each breath rises and falls on its own.  Stop during your day and observe this breath flow.  A conscious pause during your day.


The Poses

Supported Forward Fold



Benefits: calming, gently stretches lower back, nice transition from the days activities.  A good pose to do if you need a few minutes break from your daily work, easy to do and easily accessible.  Good for headaches.  Breathing is easier since muscles of the respiratory system are relaxed.
Props: chair, 2-4 blankets
Place blanket single-fold on chair draping down. Legs can stretch through chair or straddle or cross-legged.  Arms placed folded on chair in front of you. Rest forehead on arms. Tilt chin slightly toward your chest.  Close eyes. For comfort or lower back issues, sit on blanket, add rolled up blankets under knees if legs in straddle, or blocks/blankets under knees if cross legged. May add a blanket at sacrum for grounding.

Supta Baddhakonasana

Benefits: opens the hips and groin facilitating blood and energy flow to the urinary tract and reproductive organs. Opens the chest and abdomen benefiting breathing problems. 
Props: bolster, 4 blocks (or firm cushions, pillows or rolled-up blankets), 4 blankets and one extra blanket for warmth, strap and eye pillow


Place a block lengthwise under one end of a bolster to prop it up on an incline, add another block under bolster for stability. We used the wall in this week’s class placing the bolster at a higher elevation. Place a double-fold blanket on floor next to low end of bolster and a long rolled blanket on top next to bolster (for sacral support). Sit with your back to the short, low end of the bolster. Place two blocks where your knees will rest (can top with a soft blanket or use other props as necessary for propping knees)  Bring your legs into Bound Angle Pose with the soles of your feet together. Wrap a blanket around your feet to create a feeling of containment.  Lie back on the bolster. Place supports under your arms so that they are not dangling and there is no feeling of stretch in the chest. Stay in the pose for 10 to 15 minutes.

Legs up on Chair, Incline Variation
Notice the use of stuffed animals as props

See how the props fit the body
Benefits: relaxes the muscles of the lower back, legs, refreshes the legs, relaxes the muscles and organs of the abdomen.  
Props: chair, 2-3 blankets, neck roll, eye pillow
Extras: Sandbag

Place a blanket on chair so you don’t feel the hard surface.  If you need to elevate the body, you can place a triple fold blanket in front of chair, then place your hips on blanket to one side, swing the legs up onto the seat of the chair as you lower your upper body onto the bolster with blocks set up underneath. Use a neck roll to support cervical spine. Place a blanket or sandbag on legs to ground you in the pose. Arms release to the sides with palms turned up.  Use an eye pillow to shut out any light for ultimate relaxation. An eye pillow or some type of weighted object (I’ve used stuffed animals) can be placed in open palms to move and free up energy.  Stay for up to 10 minutes.  Your beginning practice may consist of only 5 minutes.  Feel the legs drain, the stress melt away.







Navigating Change
Use these 7 core yogic teachings to support you through radical life changes.
By Sally Kempton
Navigating Change
Although I have no statistical evidence, I’m convinced that when you start practicing yoga and meditation, you invite major changes into your life. Those changes start from within: Maybe your practice alters the way you define personal integrity; maybe it unleashes a deep longing in your heart or shows you truths you’ve been hiding from yourself.
Soon, these inner shifts seep into your external life. They make you question the way you do things and nudge you to live life differently. You might notice that your practice has triggered a mysterious process that I call “karmic acceleration.” In other words, having a yoga practice tends to speed up the way your relationships and life scenarios play out. So instead of putting up with an unhappy relationship or an unsatisfying job for, say, 10 years, you may find yourself bulldozing through it in 2. And not because you’re flaky.
Most of us who practice yoga will, at some point, find ourselves facing internally motivated choices that can radically alter our lives. That’s when we need to learn how to bring our practice off the mat so it can help us birth the emerging self that change promises to bring forth—and support us as we work through the fear and confusion that change can bring. I think of all this as I listen to Rita, the 37-year-old owner of a yoga studio in Pennsylvania who has been contemplating divorce for nearly five years. Her 18-year marriage has long felt emotionally dead.
She and her husband rarely spend time together, and when they do, they tend to argue over issues big and small. Part of the problem is that their lives don’t match: She’s a dedicated yogi and environmentalist; he thinks spiritual practice is a big yawn and that climate change is unproven. It’s been years since they’ve talked about anything except household matters and their teenage daughter. Yet to break up the marriage would be to end life as she knows it. After nearly 15 years out of the mainstream job market, Rita is not sure how she would cope financially, much less run her yoga studio without her husband’s support. Then, of course, there is her daughter’s well-being to consider. So, although her gut has been telling her she needs to create a different life, Rita is seized with terror when she thinks about what it would mean to get divorced. And so she puts it off.
I am a veteran of several radical life-scenario changes, so it’s not hard for me to imagine how she feels. In my mid-20s, I ended an unhappy marriage; in my late 20s, I left a perfectly satisfactory journalism career and the world of family and friends to live in a spiritual community; 30 years later, I felt called to leave that community, move across the country, and begin an entirely new life.
In two of those situations, it took me several years to take the plunge. I wanted to be sure I was doing the right thing—and let’s face it, life change is scary, especially when other people’s lives are involved and you don’t know what is waiting on the other side. Even contemplating a divorce, a career change, or a cross-country move can bring up core survival fears, which can surface in many ways: as health issues, nightmares, escapist behaviors such as overeating, lingering indecision, or a counterphobic tendency to leap out of the situation without a plan, just to get the whole thing over with.
Believe it or not, these core survival fears rise up even when the radical life change is positive. Stress studies show that “life-enhancing” events, like getting married, starting a new job, or finally getting a longed-for opportunity, are often just as stressful as negative ones (think of a bride breaking down in tears before her wedding, or of the young man who dropped out of a prestigious graduate program at Columbia because he missed his life in San Francisco).
In other words, change can be scary, even when you’ve initiated the changes yourself. What if people get hurt? How will you live with yourself if your choice turns out to be a disaster? Do you have the skills to deal with the confusion and chaos of the process? These questions paralyze Rita, and they’re the kinds of questions that will sometimes keep us lingering in stagnant or painful situations until an outside force makes the move for us.
Yoga—in its widest sense—can give us the strength and insight we need to navigate the most radical forms of change. Equally as important as the practices of yoga are some of yoga’s basic (and highly applicable) teachings—the recognition that we affect the exterior by working on the interior, that behind the diversity of life lies a fundamental oneness, that real strength is found in stillness, and that our true Self is not the shifting, fearful, egoic person that we sometimes seem to be.
One test of your yoga practice is how well it serves you during a time of big change. Yogic teachings won’t necessarily keep you from feeling scared, overwhelmed, or confused. But they can rise up within you like a wise friend to guide you through those feelings so that you don’t get lost in them. They can even help you avoid getting mired in indecision, or jumping impulsively without thinking things through.
Over the years, I’ve formed the habit of turning inward during times of transition and confusion, and asked for a helpful teaching. Much of the time, it’s the same teachings that come up again and again. Below, I offer you seven core yogic instructions that will help you navigate radical change.
1. Know That Change is Inevitable
The Buddhist Doctrine of Impermanence, annica, tells us that change is inevitable, continuous, and unavoidable. Everything changes. Just realizing that fact can protect you from turning to that most disempowering of reactions to change: “Why me?”
What the Buddhists call impermanence, a Tantric yogi would ascribe to the ever-changing nature of shakti—the intrinsic, dynamic power at the heart of life. Shakti is the cosmic, divine feminine energy that continually brings things into manifest being, keeps them going for a while, then dissolves them. Every moment, every enterprise, every cell, is part of this flow of creation, sustenance, and dissolution. This flow is happening on a macrocosmic level—as the flow of seasons, tides, and cultures—and on a microcosmic level, through the various shifts in your physical states, the ups and downs of your life, and the flow of thoughts and emotions in your mind. If you understand the divine nature of the process of change, it becomes easier to greet change with honor, surrender to it, and even partner with it as you continue on your path.
2. View the Change as an Initiation
In traditional societies, every phase of life was regarded as an initiation into a new way of being and was marked with a ceremony that often asked the initiates to step into the unknown in some way, whether it was observing a prayer vigil, spending the night in darkness, or answering questions that tested their skills. Nowadays, we don’t always do a ceremony, but we still undergo initiations. Changing careers, moving to a new city, deciding to go back to school, are all initiatory experiences, because they ask you to step outside your habits, test your skills, and, for a time, inhabit the unknown. More, each of these changes will subtly or even dramatically redefine you. You won’t be quite the same person after you step out of the old situation and into the new. The change itself, if you go through it consciously, is the doorway into the next stage of growth—one that propels you into a deeper relationship with yourself and the world.
An example: Twenty-four-year-old Frances accepted a job offer to teach English in Seoul, then freaked out when she got there, overwhelmed by loneliness and culture shock. What persuaded her to stay was recognizing the ways in which being a foreigner freed her from old self-descriptions and helped her find a new way of being herself. Similarly, when your life is changing, consider the ways in which the change will expand you, teach you about yourself, show you both your limits and your capacity to move beyond them. The more you can accept this as an initiation process, the easier it is to discover the gifts of change.



3. Meditate Through Uncertainty



The deep uncertainty that arises during processes of change is perhaps the most daunting part of the experience. Why? Because a true change process will involve surprises, reversals, false starts, and periods of coming to a dead halt. In these moments, you’re likely to experience fear, anxiety, anger, irritability, sadness, grief, and the physical and psychological contraction that often goes along with feeling uncertain and unclear. Your gut tightens, and your mind begins spinning one of your victim stories: your worst-case-scenario story, or your “I just don’t have what it takes” story, or your “I’ll never get what I need” story. And your next move is nearly always some form of escape. You turn on the TV, or eat something, or call a friend to complain.

But the real antidote to the discomfort of uncertainty is to move into it rather than away from it. You connect to the way the discomfort feels in your body. You let yourself feel it. You let go of the story that inevitably accompanies feelings of discomfort. And you just stay present with yourself and with your feelings, without resistance or expectation. The more you can be present with uncertainty, the more you can let the change process take place naturally and effectively.

It’s much easier to stay steady through a life-change process when you have a meditation practice, because meditation teaches you how to keep going back into your center, the core awareness that is your contact point with the Self and that aligns your individual consciousness with the heart of the universe. Your meditation practice can be as simple as attending to the breath or repeating a mantra, or as subtle as tuning in to the awareness that knows what you’re thinking, or as physically centering as breathing into the heart. The important thing is that it connects you to your innate sense of being, to the Presence inside you.
4. Uncover Your Truest Desire
Self-inquiry, or atma vichara, is the core yogic process for navigating change. It’s a simple but effective process of asking yourself core questions such as, “What is my true desire in this situation?” or “What outcome would be the best for everyone?” As answers surface, write them down.

Next, sit for a moment in meditation, following your breath, until you feel a sense of connection to Presence. Say to yourself, “May my deeper Self, the teacher inside me, tell me what is the right thing to do.” Then ask yourself the self-inquiry questions again and write down whatever responses come up, even if some of them seem irrelevant.

Now, look at what you’ve written and look for common threads that should give you a sense of what your deeper Self wants for you. Getting in touch with your deepest, truest desire will help you organize the entire change process.
5. Set a Strong Intention
The next step is to make a sankalpa—a clearly articulated, affirmative statement about what you intend to do. When you make a true sankalpa, you call on the power of your personal will and align your personal will with the cosmic will. If you have gone through the self-inquiry process and have a sense of what your true desire is, you should be able to make a sankalpa that is in line with your truest wish. The deeper the alignment between your core desire and your intention, the more likely you are to successfully initiate a life change that supports that alignment.

That said, it’s important to recognize that your sankalpa will change according to the time and the circumstance. At one point, the sankalpa may be, “I have a job that I love and that allows me to spend time with my children.” At another time it may be, “I am skillfully creating steppingstones to finding a new home.” At another time it may be, “I am healing my body and my spirit.”

Notice that each of these sankalpas is stated in the present tense. That’s because a sankalpa is not merely a wish, or even a statement of purpose. It’s an articulation of direction that brings your goal into the present moment. What gives a sankalpa its strength is that it assumes that the outcome you intend to manifest is not just certain but has already occurred.
6. Take Action, One Step at a Time
The very heart of the practice of yoga is abhyasa—steady effort in the direction you want to go. So when you are initiating a life change, consider the steps you need to take to make it happen, again using the technique of self-inquiry. Rita, for example, has to consider steppingstones to a different life. She asks herself, “Where will I live? Who will be my friends and support group? How will we help our daughter cope with the changes? What other sources of income do I have besides the studio? How will I pay the studio rent if my husband can’t or won’t?” Thinking through her options and possibilities helps Rita settle her fears and devise a plan, even though she doesn’t have all the answers to her questions yet.

Once you’ve thought things through, it’s crucial to take action. Effective abhyasa, in the yoga of life change, is to take things one step at a time so you avoid feeling overwhelmed. Consider Rita’s plan for gaining financial independence from her husband, for example. Her first step is to increase her workload with private yoga clients. Her second step is to take a course in conflict resolution, an area in which she has worked in the past. These actions give her the sense of financial stability and the confidence to begin talking to her husband about a divorce. Like Rita, as you take your first small steps, you’ll usually find that each step leads to another and that opportunities begin to show up in response.
7. Practice Letting Go
One of the positive byproducts of making a life change, from a yogic perspective, is the opportunity that it gives you to practice vairagya, which is usually translated as “detachment,” or letting go. That means letting go of the past; letting go of the way that things used to be; letting go of your fear, your grief, your old relationship, your old job.

But you don’t want to let go in a “hard” way, forcing yourself to be a samurai of change. Instead, let yourself grieve the losses or feel the anxiety. Then breathe out and imagine that whatever you’re holding on to is flowing out with the breath. Or offer it to the universe with a prayer—something simple like, “I offer this change and everything associated with it. May the results be of benefit to all beings.” You do this again and again, until you experience the feeling of freedom that comes with real vairagya.

In my experience, just remembering to let go—moment by moment—can by itself be the inner key to navigating positive and radical change. In fact, if all you learn from your change process is a little bit of letting go, you’ll have received one of the great gifts of change—and you’ll be one giant leap closer to living the life of your dreams.
Sally Kempton is an internationally recognized teacher of meditation and yoga philosophy and the author of Meditation for the Love of It.

See Yoga Journal’s full magazine for the articlehttp://www.yogajournal.com/wisdom/2626