Last week in my posts about anxiety Anxiety, Yoga and the Front Body and Soothing Yourself With Supported Forward Bends, I discussed yoga poses to rely on when you’re feeling anxious (supported inversions and forward bends) and yoga poses to avoid when you’re in that state (backbends, twists, and Sun Salutations).
It makes sense if you’re in a crisis period to practice the poses that calm you down and avoid stimulating poses that might exacerbate your condition. However, if you’re in a state of chronic anxiety, avoiding backbends, twists, and many of the active poses for a long period of time will move your body toward imbalance. The same is true if your practice is focused on any emotion-based condition, such as agitated depression, clinical depression, or even just chronic stress.
In this case, I feel it is better to return to a more well-rounded yoga practice (see A Week of Yoga Practice) but consider how you end your practices. By choosing an appropriate counter-pose to end your practice, you can counteract any negative emotional effects of your practice without negating the beneficial physical ones. That way, you can move on to the rest of your day with your nervous system and emotions more in balance. Some people with anxiety or agitated depression even find that beginning with a very active practice can help burn off excess energy, which makes the soothing or relaxing counter-poses at the end of the sequence more effective (or even possible, as it can be hard to stay still when you’re feeling very anxious).
My post Yoga and Your Emotions describes the emotional effects different types of poses have on most people. So if you’re interested in practicing for balancing your emotions, take a look at that and consider how a given practice (standing pose, Sun Salutation, twist, backbend, forward bend, restorative) might affect your current emotional state. Then choose one or more counter-poses—especially passive poses that can be held for long periods of time—that you can add on to the end of your practice to counteract the poses that were the main focus of the practice. For example, if you’re already feeling anxious or hyper yet need to practice backbends for the health of your body, you can end your backbend sequence with a long supported inversion, such as a Chair Shoulderstand or Legs Up the Wall pose, to calm yourself down.



Even a long Savasana of 10 minutes or more, with a mental focus, such as your breath, would be helpful as an emotional counter-pose (see Savasana Variations) or any form of yoga nidra (see Audio Tracks tab above). Stressed out people tend to skip these ending poses because they think they don’t have time and that restorative poses are not “productive.” However, when you’re suffering from chronic stress, the most beneficial practice for you is some type of conscious relaxation (see The Relaxation Response and Yoga). As with anxiety, you may need to first burn off excess energy with a more active practice, but always leave time for conscious relaxation at the end of your sequence.
