Restorative Yoga for Busyness | Attention Economy Series | Yoga with Melissa 495

Restorative Yoga

Over the last few weeks, we have been focusing on the attention economy and how this affects our physical, mental, emotional, energetic and spiritual bodies.The idea that the explosion of information available to us has led to a battle for our attention. Advertisers fight for our attention with distracting and over the top content, social media goes to extremes with both uplifting and depressing content that keeps you psychologically engaged and every marketer out there is trying to convince you that their product or service will solve your problem, problems that you might not have even known existed.

In short, the demands of others are dominating our lives. The attention economy means that our lives are often guided from the outside in, rather than the inside out. It generates a frenetic pace and busy-ness that leads to a disconnection and estrangement from ourselves.

The Chinese character for busy-ness translates as heart killing. When we our attention is turned outwards toward the agenda of the consumer culture, we lose touch with a deeper connection with ourselves. Practices like restorative yoga, allow us to slow down and restore our trust in our bodies. They allow us to open up to our experience, to show up for ourselves fully and listen to our bodies.

Restorative yoga allows us to meet ourselves where we are and how we are. With the props and the support of the ground, we can create a cocoon around our embodied self. It is impossible to self-regulate from the attention economy if we are constantly placing our attention on somebody else’s agenda. Restorative yoga allows us to open the doorway inwards to nourishment and inspiration that comes deep from within.

The direction of the attention economy is to do too much while receiving very little physical and emotional nourishment. This is the heart killing of busy-ness that the Chinese character speaks of. Restorative yoga gives us the chance to stop running, pushing and over achieving. Time to stop overspending our reserves. When we slow down in this way, we connect with the inner confidence that we can indeed slow down even more.