Supported Child's Pose

Hi and welcome to our little short on child's pose everybody's favorite pose well not mine I've got Chelsea here to model she's gonna help us out so that I can really demonstrate like there's no way I could demonstrate this pose on myself and to do a real child's pose and to actually have it be very restful I believe it needs to be supported very few people are totally comfortable just hanging out in child's pose in fact will you just show us your child's pose so when I lead workshops that one of the first things I do because it's for an audience and I don't know the students as I just haven't come into this pose because then I know exactly who I'm working with and I know Chelsea really well so I already know what I can tell you about her but that if I didn't know her this would reveal a lot to me and what it reveals to me is that she likes to be rounded here this is just the shape that she takes she doesn't do so well in lumbar flexion she does really well in thoracic flexion but do you see this sort of cascading effect her head and neck is like falling off of her thoracic and as a result the shoulders end up somewhat collapsed and it just doesn't look restful to me I'm very similar like I feel like my nose is driving into the ground when I just do this pose without support so come on up Chelsea and so I'm gonna show you how I like to set up restorative poses and the classes here on yoga anytime at the end I always end with a restorative pose or two and we don't have a lot of time to get into them because they're not restorative classes I'm just trying to wind down the class but if you're into restorative then this little short clip should kind of give you some insight in how to treat the rest of those poses so I'm just gonna give her some support and see where she goes so go ahead and come down so it's already so much better she's already less inflection here there's less kind of pushing up and her head isn't as stretched and kind of hanging off the rest of her spine she's a little congested in here so she's not fully comfortable and I also see that she didn't get really any flexion here and so I'm gonna give her just a little bit more support so come on up Chelsea I'm gonna take a blanket and just sort of make a thin bolster but I really want this blanket to support her all the way so I'm gonna get in here so that she has the support and she's gonna take her belly and lift up and over and come all the way forward nice so now she has more space in the neck she's supported here in the lumbar which is always sort of in extension because that's why the lumbar is shaped that way it holds us up but it doesn't need to hold her up here so we want to tell those muscles that it's okay to relax tell in the brain it's okay to relax those muscles and then I can before I give her some weight the sandbag I can give her just a small little cue to see if I can get just a little bit more length in here so I'm gonna I want her to feel her pelvis heavy but I'd like for you Chelsea to stretch your spine forward as much as you can you might need to push into the arms a bit and really start to stretch your spine as far forward as possible good uh-huh she's kind of trying to take her spine out like a cork like a cork and a bottle of wine she's trying to inch it forward she's just moving as much as she can good uh-huh and then rest again and so now we've given her just a little sensation something to feel and I'd really like for her to take the front of the spine so when we think of the spine we haven't think of the back but to take the front of the spine and try to slide the front of the spine forward even more so go ahead and try that reach forward for there we go so we got just a little bit more softness here now I'm ready to give her the support and that is to place the bolster in the area that is telling me it needs some external feedback that it can relax how do you feel hmm so if there's no sigh of then maybe a little bit more adjustment a little bit more tweaking of the pose is worth it you should be able to be in your poses for several minutes and be totally at peace and comfortable shouldn't try to fall asleep that's not the goal but you should feel so supported that there is zero work to be done in the poses just one more thing I'd like to leave you with because I see this also when I travel around and teach I see people hear what I'm saying about props and then use them too much so you can also over prop if I gave Chelsea too many blankets underneath then that wouldn't be ideal for her either so it's just the right amount for you to be completely relaxed so that you can let the shape just kind of gain its own presence in your body and that your mind can remember it I encourage you to take these principles and apply them to the restorative poses that we do at the end of the sequences good luck