Gentle Mindful Hatha Yoga | 20-Min Nervous System Reset (No Standing Poses)

Welcome to this gentle, mindful Hatha yoga practice – a 20-minute class designed to bring you back home to your body, your breath, and your innate state of calm awareness.

This session is all about slow, intuitive movements and soft presence. There are no standing postures in this class – everything takes place from a seated, kneeling, lunge, or lying-down position, allowing you to stay close to the ground and deeply connected to a sense of stability and ease. We begin with seated warm-ups, inviting you to move with curiosity and mindfulness, gently exploring the body’s range of motion. Throughout, you’ll receive mindful prompts for stillness and awareness, encouraging you to notice subtle sensations, shifts in your breath, and the quiet presence of your own being – your spirit, your soul, or simply the essence of who you are.

This is not about pushing, stretching, or “doing” yoga perfectly. It’s about being, allowing each movement and breath to unfold naturally, like a soft wave rolling through the body. This kind of mindful yoga practice is deeply soothing for the nervous system, helping to shift us out of stress and into a state of rest, recovery, and healing.

Mindful Yoga and the Nervous System:
Our modern lives often keep us in a state of chronic stress, activating the body’s sympathetic nervous system – the “fight, flight, or freeze” response. While this system is essential for survival in short bursts, being stuck in it for too long can lead to tension, anxiety, fatigue, and even physical health issues.

Yoga, particularly when practiced with mindfulness and slowness, helps to engage the parasympathetic nervous system – often called the “rest and digest” mode. This branch of the nervous system is responsible for deep relaxation, improved digestion, balanced hormones, and a sense of inner safety. By combining gentle movement with conscious breathing and stillness, yoga sends powerful signals to the brain that it’s safe to relax.

When you slow down and pay attention to your breath and body, you begin to shift the balance of your nervous system. Breath awareness, especially slow, smooth exhalations, activates the vagus nerve, which plays a key role in calming the body and mind. Over time, this kind of mindful yoga can help retrain your nervous system to respond to stress more gracefully, allowing for better emotional resilience and a greater sense of peace.

What to Expect in This Class:
Seated warm-ups that gently open the body and connect you to your breath.
Somatic-inspired movements that encourage listening to what your body truly needs.
Gentle kneeling and lunge variations to ease tension in the hips and spine without strain.
Grounding lying-down postures for deep relaxation and nervous system reset.
Mindful pauses throughout the practice, giving you time to notice the subtle shifts in your energy, mind, and emotions.

The Power of Slowness and Stillness:
In our fast-paced world, it can feel almost radical to slow down. Yet, this is exactly what our bodies and minds crave. Slowness allows us to move out of automatic patterns, to feel each breath and each sensation more fully. In these moments, yoga becomes less about physical exercise and more about a gateway to presence.

Stillness does not mean emptiness – rather, it is a space where we can reconnect with our innate state of being, which is already calm, whole, and at peace. Through this class, I invite you to notice that beneath all the busyness and stress, there is a quiet centre of awareness that is always there. Yoga simply helps us peel back the layers of distraction to reconnect with this deep well of peace within.

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Joy 🌻

Joy Prater from Yoga with Joy is a qualified yoga teacher, however, she cannot assist you with any ailments or injuries that could possibly hinder you while following any of Yoga with Joy’s videos. Joy Prater highly recommends that you consult a doctor or physician before practising with these online yoga classes. As with any exercise, participating in these yoga classes could result in physical injury. By choosing to voluntarily engage in Yoga with Joy’s videos you agree that you do so at your own risk; assuming all risk of injury to yourself.

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