Yoga For Anger

Hello everyone, welcome to Yoga for Anger. My name is Angelica. I've been teaching yoga for 17 years and practicing yoga for 37 years. This yoga class is going to be a restorative yoga class. I woke up this morning in kind of a bad mood. I mean, when I first woke up, I wasn't in a bad mood, but then I got on the internet. It's just never a good idea to get on social media when you first wake up. It's a really It's a really bad idea. Don't do it. Don't do it. Anyhow, and I was inspired to create this class because then I pinched my finger. And you know how you start having those days where you're like, and then I stubbed my toe, and then this went wrong, and this went wrong. And so I thought, you know what, let me do this class, uh, Restorative Yoga for Anger. And so we can kind of just release, reset, and get back to a place where we feel comfortable and we feel like we can go on with our life and show up for the people in our lives and spread happiness and love, which is the whole goal, because the energy that we put out is the energy that we give back. Okay, before we get started, if you would like to become a yoga teacher, I do one-on-one online yoga teacher training. That's means it's just you and me in the class. Each week you'll get released new content. You go through all the videos, complete all the assignments, and then at the end of your individual week, which could be Monday, it could be Wednesday, it could be Saturday, we don't know, um, because we set it up to work for you and your success. At the end of each individual week, you and I will go over your assignments. I'll answer any of your questions, and we'll focus on making your dreams and goals happen. I do have a 200-hour, a 300-hour, and a 500-hour Yoga Alliance approved online yoga teacher training, and you can check that out in the description below, as well as all the props that we're going to use today. Now, if you don't have any props, you absolutely do not need them. If you do not have a bolster, what you can use instead is get a pillowcase and stuff it with some thick pillows. Just stuff it in there with at least 2 pillows and get it nice and tight. So that it's kind of like this. If you want a bolster, check in the link below. The bolsters that I use are the same ones I used at my yoga studio for 10 years. They hold up for a really long time. Lots of people used them. These are really nice, thick, hardcore bolsters, and I love them. And if you don't have any blocks, these are the blocks I'll be using. These blocks today. They're not blocks, they're eggs, but I'll be using these yoga props. If you, um, don't have any blocks at home, it's okay, just use books. Like, honestly, get a couple of thick books like Milton's Paradise Lost, The Complete Works of Milton is a great one. I like these because they're rounded, so we get like a little bit more— fits with our body, you know, it fits with our body. Anyhow, link is below if you want to grab those. Just use books if you don't have them. It doesn't matter. It doesn't— you don't need all the extra stuff. I used to think that all the time. I used to think I need all this extra stuff in order to start doing this thing. I need, I need all this. I need these things. I need all of this stuff. Just do it. Just get in, do it. One last thing that I do have is a blanket that I use to kind of tilt myself up and to warm myself. You can use any throw blanket that you have, just fold it up. It doesn't matter, it doesn't have to be this one. I actually did purchase this in Mexico, which, uh, you know, if you're gonna be down in Mexico, grab you one. If you're not, don't worry about it, they're too expensive. If you have a Lobster or Flying J by you, they sell Mexican blankets like really cheap. They're at the trucker truck stop. So, you know, little tip if you want to get one. Let's go ahead and get started today with our practice. Now, if you're like me, you're feeling a little bit irritated today, and we want to bring that energy in and just calm down. I really encourage you to stay with me through the whole practice today. I'm only going to do 45 minutes. It's not going to be long, it's not going to be hardcore, it's not going to be a very tough practice. It's really just to get your mind back in place. And honestly, our mind— the chitta vrittis, that's what we call in yoga, is the modifications of the mind— the mind is really the thing that screws us up along the way. The mind is the thing that stops us from living our dreams and stops us from having the life that we want. So please stick with me all the way through shavasana. Stay for the whole practice. I really encourage you to spend this time on yourself. All right, come into an easy seated pose. For you, this could be just like this, it could be like this, it could be with your legs extended, it could be with your knees bent and sitting in like a— what we call Hero's Pose. It doesn't matter which way your easy seated pose looks like. We just want to sit in such a way that we can meditate for a hot minute. Now, if you have a hard time sitting straight up— and people have had that before— sit up against a, a couch or a wall and help that to prop you up so that you can sit. You could also sit in a chair if you really wanted to. I just don't have one conveniently located. All right, lengthen through the spine and Relax down through the shoulders. Allow the crown of your head to come up so that your spine is nice and straight. Imagine that you're lengthening through the spine. Beautiful, you're doing a really great job. And if it feels comfortable for you, just let your eyes close. Maybe rest your hands in your lap, on your knees. You can bring your palms up to receive positive energy. You can keep your palms down to keep that energy within and try to cultivate more awareness with inside of you. Whichever feels good to you is what I want you to focus on today. Taking a deep inhale and then exhale out the nose. Breathe in deep through the nose. And breathe out through the nose. Notice that your mind will start to wander. There's nothing wrong with that. It's completely normal. That's part of being a human. When our mind wanders, we're not trying to control the mind. We are trying to acknowledge and not react. So I encourage you in this short meditation that we're about to do, and really throughout the whole practice today, that if thoughts come into your mind like, "Oh, I need to do the laundry, I need to make dinner, I need to clean the house, I need to do this, I need to do that," as those things come into your mind, that's okay. It's normal. That's part of being a human being. That's part of the way our brain works. It's our chitta vrittis. It's our modifications in the mind. Our yoga practice is meant to allow us to take those thoughts and say, okay, that's great that I'm having those thoughts. I'm going to react to them later after this practice. I'm going to sustain thinking about those things until afterwards. And this is how we start to cultivate a stronger control over our lives just in general. We want to breathe in and out through our nose through our whole practice today. Breathing in and out through the nose helps to calm the fight or flight response. You're doing a great job. Just focus on your breath. Try to keep the same amount of inhale as the same amount of exhale. You see, we want to control ourselves. We want to not react to anger. If we want to not react to stimuli in our environment, we must first control our breath. The breath is really the key. Just keep breathing. You're doing great. I'm still here with you. We're still focused on just starting to take control of the nervous system through the breath. You may have come to this practice today in a space of upset, in a space of discombobulation, not feeling what you want to feel for yourself. This is you taking that back. This is you taking your space back. Only you control your mind. All right, go ahead and just slowly open your eyes. Great. Hopefully you're beginning to feel better. If you're not, that's okay. You actually don't even have to feel better by the end of this practice if you don't want to. There's no guarantees. There's no guarantees in life about anything. But the more we practice, the more we cultivate awareness, the stronger we become. All right, we're going to move into Paschimottanasana, or intense Western stretch forward fold. Extend your legs straight in front of you. If it feels good to you to, um, continue to have your back up against a wall, please feel free to do that. If you don't have a bolster like I have, you You can stack a couple pillows, stiff pillows. You could even use a couch cushion, that works as well. Um, you can flip your bolster up this way. Again, the bolster that I use is in the description. You can continue to sit on a blanket if that feels comfortable to you. You don't have to if it doesn't. If you have books or blocks, you can use them for folding forward. If you need a little bit extra, grab whatever works for you and whatever makes you feel good. I got all the extra stuff because I've been doing this for like almost 40 years. You don't have the extra stuff, just grab what you got. Grab what you got. You're fine. All right, lengthen through the spine, and then on your exhale, we're just gonna fold forward. Now I want you to take a moment here to think about where is our breath. Did it start to get shallow again? Do we start to breathe in and out through our mouth? Where is our breath? The next thing we want to think about is where are we feeling this. Ideally, we're going to feel this in the backs of our legs and then our low back. You might feel it a little bit in our mid-back depending on the tightness of your body. But the main thing is, is that we're not judging where we're feeling this. Now, if you're ever experiencing any pain, which is pretty unlikely in this style of practice, but let's just say that you are, back off. You don't have to experience pain. I can't be there with you, so we can't talk about what's happening in your body, but What I do want you to cultivate is an awareness of your body, an awareness of how your body feels, an awareness of what's going on inside of your body. Now the nice thing about these poses is that they're releasing poses. So as you're folding into this forward fold, begin to bring into your mind the thing that's just really teeing you off right now. So you just can't go through that again. You can't deal with that again. You don't want to deal with that. And we're going to make a conscious decision together to just release it. I know sometimes it's easier said than done, but what we can control is our mind. We can control the peace in our mind and control how that's cultivating in our mind. Let it go. So we get to choose our thoughts. We might not be able to choose our circumstances. We might, might not be able to choose what's going on around us. But we most certainly can choose the way we think about it. For some people, when we come into these forward folds, when we hold these deep forward folds in, in this position where we're protected, it feels normal to cry, to release. If that's you, that's completely normal. Am I— I got my finger pinched today. I threw some things. And I let myself express that because it's how we release. It's how we let go. It's how we move out those feelings, that adrenaline, the hormones. In the wild, animals will shake after they experience a traumatic incidence, and we don't do that. But the shaking, what it does is it helps to move all of the hormones that they were using to create animal instincts, to just move them and propel them without thinking. And so they, they shake to release all of that. And unfortunately, that's not something that we have been taught to do. So it's a tool that most certainly we can use, and I do utilize it myself, but some form of release. So the crying when I pinched my finger was a form of release. Go ahead and let's just slowly roll our way up. Good. You're doing really great. I'm really glad that you're still here, and I'm glad that you're taking care of yourself. I think it's really important. We just, we just don't do that. And I'm glad that you are. All right, let's go ahead and roll up now. Next, we're going to do another forward fold. This is a wide-legged forward fold. If you have these, then I'm in love with— the cool thing about them is that they can go underneath of the legs. Just love this. I love them. We got to support the guy that makes these because he's thinking about not making them anymore. And so you got to— I don't get anything. I don't get anything from it if you go and buy these. I get nothing. I get $0, but Um, I just think they're so incredible, and he's just a single dad out there in North Carolina making these yoga props, so you gotta buy them. All right, wide-legged forward fold. Bring your legs as wide as feels comfortable. Now you can stick some props underneath your legs if you want, or, or not. It really doesn't matter. You don't need them. But if you have them, you got them, light them. I used to be a smoker for like 20 years, but I quit successfully. I do feel like it's hard to cope when you used to be a smoker. It's like your best friend, right? You're losing your best friend. All right, legs as wide as you feel comfortable. You're You're going to feel this in the inner groin. Maybe you got your pillow, maybe got your bolster, and we're just going to fold over it however that feels comfortable to you. Now, when I start out, it's a little bit harder for me to fold all the way into the bolster, so I need a little bit more support. That's okay, take it out. As we hold longer. All right, we're just going to fold into this, another releasing pose. This time we're working on the area in the inner thigh. So we're moving, we're working on our first chakra— safety, stability, home, finances, family— and we're moving into our second chakra, which is sexuality and creativity, emotions. So it feels— if it feels that you're bringing up some emotions, if you're starting to think about things it have to do with your sense of stability, which is really what anger is, right? It's like this, this thing that hits us in our stable place. And that's why we're mad, because we feel like we don't have control over this space of being stable in our life. We don't have— we feel like in some way we've lost control over something. And nobody likes that feeling. I don't like that feeling. I'm sure you don't like that feeling. Nobody likes that feeling. Crappy feeling to feel. But our yoga practice allows us to sit with it and start to think about why are we feeling that? Where does that come from? What's the root of that anger? Because anger comes from fear, right? So for me, I felt afraid when I saw things on social media today. That we were gonna go through another thing that we've gone through for the last 2 years, and that really freaked me out. And so it's that fear. And you know, it used to be like I would say like, well, those things are irrational and that's not going to happen. You know what, we don't know that now. We don't know because like stuff that I never thought would happen happened. We don't know that. But we can still control our mind. We can still control our mind right now. We've still got that. And the cultivation of the mind is our biggest strength. We can control the foods that we put into our body and the energy that they get. We can control how much time we spend meditating. We can control how much time we spend exercising. We can just start to make ourselves an optimal self. I recently started a program called 75 Hard, and it's a mental toughness program. It's about keeping promises to yourself. One of those things that we're doing is doing this yoga class together. We're keeping a promise to ourselves to practice yoga. For me, it's practicing yoga every day. For me, a promise that I want to make to myself is to continue to put out these videos for you, to continue to make these yoga classes for you, because when I'm helping you, I'm helping me. And frankly, I could use the help right now. When we're doing this together, when I see your comments— I woke up this morning to an incredible, really nice comment. It doesn't usually happen on Instagram and TikTok. You get a lot of not so nice comments over there, so to open it up and see a good comment on YouTube Creator Studio, I was like, yay, thank you, you know. Oh, I can, I can start to go a little deeper. I don't know if you can start to go a little deeper, but maybe bring it a little bit deeper now. Maybe you don't, maybe you back off, it doesn't matter. But the more we release, you know, our muscles are just holding all this tension, right? Our muscles are just holding on to all the anger and the upset, the frustrations. Just letting them go. And again, if you are at home, you feel like crying, that's okay. You can do that. I'm trying to hold back tears. That's a incredible waste of time. We don't want to hold it back, we want to release it. The faster we release it, the faster we get to acceptance, right? It's like part of— anger is part of the stages of grief. It's one of the earlier parts. And I remember when my dog had passed away. It was so hard, and I got to like the depression part, and I was so sad. And I read that depression is the last stage before going through the stages of grief. I like woke up the next morning and I was like, okay, because I knew like, okay, I went through all the stages now. I did everything. I went through all that. Yeah, it can be rough, you know. Wait, I'm gonna let us just relax here and breathe into this and just let go for a minute or so. And when it feels good to you, go ahead and just slowly roll your way up. Maybe taking your bolster, put it out to the side. Taking your hands, bringing them underneath of your knees, just slowly rolling that together. And the soles of the feet come together, let the knees Come out wide. We're going to come into a mild backbend, call this baddha konasana. So in order to set up for this one, you're going to maybe take your bolster. If you have books or blocks, you can take them and put them underneath your bolster. That'll give you a little bit more lift. And we're going to bring just our back to the bolster. I'm also going to take my blanket and fold it over to create kind of a pillow for my head. Again, grab any blanket that you have, it doesn't matter. A smaller one kind of works a little bit better. And you're just going to roll back and bring the pillow— the blanket to be your pillow. I got— you could actually just use a pillow if you have a pillow. Bring the soles of your feet together, and the closer to you you can get them, the better. I'm going to grab a couple more of these and just slide them under my knees. To support the knees. If you don't have those, you can use books. Um, you don't have any of that, you don't need it. If you have a strap, you can take the strap and bring it around your waist and around your ankles and pull it kind of tight, and that'll pull your heels to you. I actually don't have a strap. Would like to have one, but I don't have one, and so I'm living without it, which is the way that you can live too. All right, let your arms come to your sides. When your palms face up, if that feels comfortable. If it doesn't, you can bring your hand onto your stomach. Like, it doesn't— do what makes you feel comfortable. Like, literally, y'all, I'm almost 50 and I'm just like, I'm done. I'm done, like, trying to be comfortable for other people. I'm gonna be comfortable for me. Comfortable for me. So I want you to be comfortable for you. Doesn't matter what I say, it matters what you want to do. Do what you want to do. Take responsibility for yourself and do your own thing. All right, we're gonna let our heart open here. We're gonna move up here and start working on the heart chakra. We're gonna open up, start working on our Manipura. Okay, so I want you to take a deep inhale through the nose. And then go out the nose. Breathe in deep through the nose. Fill everything, all of your body, just fill your body with air. And then let it go out the nose. Inhale through the nose. Exhale. You're doing really great here. You're doing really great. Just let it all go. Let it all go. Let it all just melt. Let it melt into the mat. Let it melt into your bolster. Let it melt into your blankets, into your pillows. Let your shoulders roll open. Let your heart start to open. You've taken this time to yourself. So that you can begin to cultivate a greater understanding of how to not react when things are not going exactly the way that you planned, when life is not happening the way in which we wanted it to happen, when there are forces outside of our control. We come to our yoga practice. And by coming to our yoga practice, I don't mean these physical poses. I mean the practice that's happening in our mind, the sensation of the chitta vritti, the modifications of the mind. There are many different modifications of the mind. There are many different ways that the mind modifies reality. And the one thing that we don't realize is that we can actually choose to create our reality. And I know that seems like kind of crazy, but it's true. When we visualize and the energy that we put out into the world, that energy comes back to us. It comes back to us, and then that energy becomes our reality. So when we take time to do things like this yoga practice, when we take time to find the calmness, to find the peace to find where we feel good. When we do that, that's when our yoga practice begins to really unfold, and that's when our lives begin to really come into control, and that's when we begin to feel optimal, and that's when our heart we can still open, and it allows us to see the abundance in the world. You see, the Buddha said that all life is suffering, but he said all life is suffering because we make it suffering. All life is really bliss. It's our minds blocking that bliss. It's our minds stopping us from experiencing the bliss and the happiness. There's so much abundance in this world. Whatever it is that you want to create for yourself, however it is that you want to manage your life, it's right there for you. There are all kinds of people have done incredible things in the face of adversity, and you can do that as well. You absolutely can become a leader in your own life. We're gonna take a few minutes here just to lie in this pose and release in quiet together, knowing that I'm with you even though we're just on a computer screen, on phone screen. We're not with each other right now physically. On the astral plane, on the plane of imagination, on the energetic plane, I am with you and I am sending you an incredible vibration of love, of abundance, happiness, and fulfillment. Wait to feel it wash all over you. Slowly, just maybe letting your eyes open. Just let your awareness come back into the pose. Bringing the soles of your feet onto the ground, let your knees come together. And maybe just roll to one side if it feels good. Put any kind of props that you've created for yourself out of the way, just pressing yourself up, coming into a nice easy seated pose. Restorative yoga is great. There's a lot that's going on with it, but I love the way it makes me feel. It just feels so good, you know, it just feels really good. And I feel like you get that time to just really be quiet with your mind. I used to do all these really tough practices, and what I found was that honestly, the mind practice is the practice that is the most fulfilling for us and makes the biggest change. You can go into your hot yoga class and punish your body, or you can come into your restorative class and start to work with your mind. And when yoga first started— I'm just rolling up a blanket into a roll— when yoga first started, it was about the mind. And there were only 5 poses in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika. There were 5 poses, and those poses were all just meant to help the mind Those poses were all meant to help the mind cultivate an awareness and a calmness. I'm turning sideways so you can kind of see me. I'm working with limited space here, but if I can do it, you can do it. Take your roll And we're going to start in our thoracic spine, so, and right where your breastbone is. If you have a bra strap, that's like right where you want it to go. And we're just going to bring the arms out to the side, maybe in a cactus position. Bring your arms out to to the side. I'm gonna keep my knees bent because I don't have the space to extend them, but you can certainly extend your legs here. We're just doing a little bit of opening on our back. This is actually my favorite back opener. It feels so amazing. And continuing with our theme here of just opening the heart up. Because when we come into a space of anger, we close down, we close our heart, we shut it off from the world. But we gotta open it back up. We gotta come back to that bliss. We gotta know that there are so many good things happening. There's so much good going on. And I know it's really hard to see sometimes, but we've got to just let it open up to that. We've got to just accept that that is really— that happiness is the true living. Another option you have here is to bring your legs into baddha konasana, bound angle pose. Hopefully it will stop being cold here in Colorado, the snow will stop and we'll be able to go back to doing yoga outside. But today we're still inside. We're still inside. Just like my pinched finger really hurt, now it only hurts a little bit, right? And that's the same with that anger that we started with today. Now it only— it's only affecting us a little bit. All right, we're going to go ahead and roll that down just a little bit. I'm going to take that— oh yeah, right there. We're going to take that rolled blanket down just to open the back up a little bit more. Remember your breath. If you've forgotten your breath, remember your breath. Bring it back to that breath. All right, we're going to bring it down one more, one more time, this time into our lumbar spine. That ought to feel really good after all that we've done. I have an old injury in my lumbar spine from going to a John Friend class like in 2000 and 4 in 2005. Sometimes it just hits me, you know, it just hits me, and I think about the energetics of that, that where did it come from? It's from this Manipura chakra. Our, our Manipura chakra controls our power. So it's actually like Anger is right in there, right? It's in the stomach, in the solar plexus. And I think about, you know, where that came from energetically, and that where I was learning a new level of control. I had recently lost a job that I really liked, and I was just becoming a full-time yoga teacher, and I was learning to navigate what that felt like and how to have confidence in that new role. So sometimes the things that we feel in our body really just come from the ways in which we are navigating new parts of our life. All right everyone, we're going to go ahead and take that blanket out. If you can extend your legs, go ahead and extend your legs out for final resting pose, shavasana. You can bring your hands onto your stomach and bring your arms out to your sides. If you want to use your blanket as a pillow, or if you want to use your blanket as a blanket because it's cold because you're in Colorado, you woke up to snow again this morning, you can certainly do that. I'm not going to be able to extend my legs out here because I'm in a small space, but that's all right. We're just going to lay here and breathe in and out through the nose, taking a nice short savasana. Work with what you got. Letting every part of your body relax into the mat. Oh, there we go. Now I can extend my legs. Let your feet relax, let your ankles and your heels relax. Feel the relaxation moving up your legs to your hips, relaxing your shoulders, your stomach, front of your body and the back of your body. Let your arms relax, palms face up or down to keep energy in. If it doesn't feel comfortable to close your eyes, no worries, just pick a point in the ceiling that's not moving and just focus on that point. Let your jaw relax. And your face. Your eyes relax in the socket and the crown of your head relax. Come back to that nice slow rhythmic breath in and out through the nose. Slowly begin to wiggle your toes and your fingers. Any organic movement that feels good to you. Rolling over onto your right side into a fetal position, just take a moment here to thank yourself for doing this practice today, for taking control of your life, your emotions, and your space. And then, friends, let's press our way up into an easy seated pose. Ah, so who feels better? Who feels better than they did when they started this practice? I do, I do. Thank you, thank you for doing this with me. All right, whatever your easy seated pose is, come into it. Hands to the heart center. The light within me honors the divine and beautiful light within each and every one of you. I thank you so much for coming today. Thank you, you really have no idea how much I appreciate you. Please do subscribe and like this video, comment, let me know what you want to see more of. The light within me honors the beautiful light within each and every one of you. Om. Namaste. Thank you, thank you. Remember that You are amazing, and I'm so glad that you're here, and I'm so glad that you're taking care of yourself. I have all kinds of resources below in the description. Please do hit that up, and please subscribe. It means a lot to me to grow this channel and to be able to reach a broader audience of people just like you, and to help us all get over whatever is going on in this world right now. I love you. Thank you again. I'll see you tomorrow.