You dim the lights, prop everyone up, lower your voice to its softest register, and say, “Now just relax.” Then you look around the room and a small voice starts in: is this actually working? Are they settling, or just lying there waiting for it to end?
If you’ve ever wondered that mid-class, you’re in good company. I wondered it for years before I trusted my own restorative teaching. What finally changed things was simpler, and a lot less verbal, than I expected: you can’t talk a body into rest. You can only set it up for rest.
In June’s Comfort Zone Conversation, I taught a room full of yoga teachers how to do exactly that. Here’s the breakdown.
“Relax” is not a cue
Never in the history of relaxing has anyone relaxed by being told to relax. The parasympathetic nervous system—the rest-and-digest side—comes online when it gets evidence that it’s safe to let go, not because we announce that it’s time. So our job shifts. We stop trying to lead the relaxation and start building the conditions where it can happen on its own. That steadiness you hold at the front of the room is part of the setup, too. It’s the same principle behind nervous system co-regulation.
Set the room before you cue a single shape
Before anyone lies down, the room is already doing half the teaching. You want three things: soft, warm, and comfortably dark. Soft means cushioning every contact point so no part of the body rests on a cold, hard floor. Warm means the upper 70s if you can manage it, because body temperature drops as people settle—a room that feels fine at the start will feel chilly twenty minutes in. Dark means low light and an eye covering, which tells the nervous system the demands of the day are over.
Prop the body: support knees, head, and arms
Good propping puts muscles into what I call short and slack, supported enough that they have nothing left to hold. Tuck support under the knees so the hip flexors and low back can release. Cushion the head so the neck isn’t craning. And my favorite: rest the backs of the wrists on blocks so the biceps go quiet. There are six supports in all, and I walk through every one, with photos, in the free guide below.
Give it time, then get out of the way
Restorative shapes need longer than feels comfortable—think three to five shapes, held 15 to 30 minutes each, not ten quick poses. The settling happens in layers: the body quiets first, the mind takes longer, and the deep shift often arrives right after the moment most of us would lose our nerve and move on. Once everyone is propped, your job is to be a calm, steady presence at the edge of the room. Talk less. Let the silence do its work, and come out of each shape slowly so you don’t undo it. How you hold those final minutes is also how students remember the whole class.
Restorative is not a slower vinyasa class
Before we get into the sequence, let’s get on the same page. A gentle yoga class repeats movements often, holds them briefly, and keeps the intensity light. A yin yoga class visits each shape once and holds it two to six minutes while time does the work. Restorative yoga visits each shape once, too, holds it far longer, and aims for zero intensity—nothing to stretch, nothing to achieve, nothing for the body to manage. That is why a restorative class has three to five shapes in an hour rather than thirty, and why the sequence below looks so short on paper.
For more on the difference between gentle, yin, and restorative yoga, see this video:
A 60-minute restorative yoga sequence
Four shapes, a long savasana, and more propping than feels reasonable the first time you set it up. Hold times assume a 60-minute class with the room already soft, warm, and comfortably dark before anyone walks in. Every shape carries the same savasana setup underneath it—knees supported, head supported, backs of the wrists resting on blocks—so you are not rebuilding the propping from scratch each time.
Arrival, 4 minutes. Students come in, gather props, and lie down on their backs with knees supported. No instruction beyond where the props go. Let the room get quiet before you say anything at all. Then do some level-setting about what is about to happen.
Supported reclining bound angle, 15 minutes. Bolster lengthwise along the spine, soles of the feet together, a block or a rolled blanket under each outer thigh so the hips have somewhere to land. A folded blanket under the head. Blocks under the backs of the wrists. This is the most open shape in the class, so it goes first, while attention is still available.
Supported backbend over a bolster, 12 minutes. Bolster crosswise under the mid-back, head resting on a folded blanket so the neck is not craning, legs long or knees supported—whichever lets the low back go quiet. If anyone is holding, lower the bolster or swap it for a folded blanket. Extension, without a single thing to do.
Side-lying supported twist, 7 minutes each side. Knees stacked on a bolster, torso turning only as far as it goes without effort, a second bolster or blanket under the top arm so the shoulder is not hanging in space. Head supported in the direction that lets the neck rest. Rotation both ways, which is the move most restorative classes leave out.
Savasana with the full setup, 12 minutes. Everything the class has been building toward, and the shape your students will remember. Knees, head, and arms supported, plus whatever weight, covering, and warmth you have. Come out slowly—sit up over the course of a minute, not a breath—so you do not undo the hour.
That is roughly 57 minutes of holds and 3 minutes of transitions, which sounds impossible until you teach it and discover how much of the hour disappears into moving props.
At 45 minutes, drop the backbend and keep the other three. At 75 minutes, keep the same four shapes and add about four minutes to each rather than adding a fifth shape—more time in fewer shapes is always the restorative answer.
What to do while they lie there
Once everyone is propped, your job changes. You are not leading the relaxation; you’re just holding space while it happens. Stay low, stay still, and say very little. If you get up to dim a light or adjust the thermostat, quietly say what you are doing, so nobody is startled by movement they cannot see.
The settling happens in layers: the body usually quiets first, the mind takes considerably longer, and the shift most students came for tends to arrive right around the moment a nervous yoga teacher would decide the shape has gone on long enough and move things along. Hold your nerve! Give your students the gift of luxurious time and space in each shape.
Teach the same sequence for a month
Four shapes is not very many, which is exactly why this class rewards repetition. Teach this same base sequence for a month and change one variable at a time: the prop height in the backbend one week, a different arm position in the bound angle the next, five more minutes in savasana the week after that. Your students stop spending the first ten minutes figuring out the setup and start dropping into it on arrival—that is the magic of restorative yoga in action. The framework underneath it is the same one I use for an active class—six moves of the spine, four lines of the legs, two core actions. You can read the long version of the 6–4–2 framework if you want to see how the checklist works when there is more movement to account for.
Restorative is its own practice
Restorative isn’t gentle yoga with extra props, and it isn’t yin with longer holds. It’s aimed at a different part of the nervous system, so it has its own method. If you want to get clear on where it sits, here’s the difference between gentle, yin, and restorative yoga, and how yoga nidra differs from restorative.
What the sequence alone won’t tell you
You have a full class now, and you could teach it on Thursday. What a written plan cannot tell you is whether your transitions are slow enough, whether your voice is drawing students out of their own experience, or whether the student in the corner is settling into deep rest . . . or (im)patiently waiting for it to be over.
Knowledge is rarely the bottleneck in teaching. One of my mentorship members, Peggy, owned my book The Art of Yoga Sequencing and still spent 150 minutes planning each class until her work in the mentorship program brought it down to 45. What changed was not more information: it was repetition, feedback, and having someone help her apply what she already knew.
Your next step
You don’t need to feel enlightened to teach restorative well. It’s a craft, and like any craft, you learn it by practicing it.
Grab my free Best Savasana Ever guide—it shows all six supports so you can recreate them in your very next class. And when you’re ready to teach a full restorative class or workshop with confidence, Fundamentals of Teaching Restorative Yoga is my self-paced course: prop demos for every shape, a full prop library, ready-to-teach class plans, and 20 Yoga Alliance CEUs.
Or come practice with me in person
In March 2027 I’m teaching a five-day immersion at Kripalu Center in the Berkshires: Teaching Restful Yoga—Gentle, Yin, Restorative, and Nidra for Teachers, March 7–12, worth 23.5 Yoga Alliance continuing education hours. If you’d rather learn this in a room full of yoga teachers than alone on a screen, come join me. There’s a weekend retreat just before it, March 5–7, if you’d like to rest before you learn to teach rest.
