Not All Movement Feels Safe to Your Brain

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Has anyone tried aerial yoga? I had a very interesting and unexpected experience with it a couple of weeks ago 😰

A friend invited me to join her for a restorative aerial yoga class. This was my first experience working with the silks/swings, and they look really comfortable in pictures. But what I quickly discovered is that because the silks are suspended, and you are loading all or part of your body weight into them, that means that the silk is meeting that load by pushing back into your body. When the fabric is spread out, like under their lower legs in this image, that distributes the load more evenly across a larger space, which increases comfort. When the fabric is bunched together, as it is near their knees and ankles here, that distributes the same amount of load in a smaller space, which generally also means that you are stimulating not just surface level receptors, but deep pressure receptors in your body. Not to mention that the load can also create a lot of mobility across joints. And my body doesn't really like any of that.

Also, lest I forget, you begin and end the class lying in the fabric as though it were a hammock . . . which sounds really nice until you consider that the fabric is completely surrounding you, and if you have any claustrophobia, that's a problem 😱

Given that I am aware of how the brain works and how it responds to threat, I ended the class with an equal mixture of wanting to burst out crying and wanting to laugh at the ridiculousness of how threatening the whole experience was for me. So I did neither, only letting out a few giggles and a few tears. And then I got ice cream. And slowly the world seemed safer 😊