Bolsters are a member of a series of apparatus’ developed in the 1960s to assist novice, pregnant, injured, and disabled practitioners attain and maintain precise body placement with their poses. These handy pillows are available in an assortment of materials that give them varying degrees of firmness, and they’re offered in an assortment of shapes and sizes as well.
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Uses Of Yoga Bolsters:
While bolsters can be utilized to enhance stability in many poses for beginners, intermediate and advanced practitioners enjoy using them to intensify the stretch of their poses, add support, and help them relax into poses that can be challenging to hold. Some poses have even been adapted to use a bolster in a way that allows the practitioner to become completely passive within a position that encourages increased circulation of blood, glandular excretions, and pranic energy, thus enhancing the effects of that particular pose.
Bolsters are also appreciated for their ability to help beginning practitioners ease into challenging poses and increase their flexibility and strength until the bolster can be removed.
Bolsters are Important Helpers
Injured and pregnant practitioners often have difficulty in attaining proper positions in floor-poses, and this is a matter of serious concern because yoga is a precise science. The basic premise of yoga is to place the body in certain positions that conduct our pranic energy along specific lines of our nervous system. When the poses are held correctly while the breath is channeled in specific rhythms appropriate to each pose, the practitioner sets subtle energies into motion that can benefit the function of the heart and other organs, the circulatory system, lymph, and adrenal systems, and the nervous system.
Yoga poses also stretch our muscles, tendons, and ligaments in ways that other forms of exercise and stretch are not able to, and this aspect of yoga has greatly increased its popularity. However, the aforementioned benefits are more subtle, and in some ways more powerful. Pranic energy of the breath that is channeled through a pose being held incorrectly can be harmful and even potentially dangerous.
Bolster Controversy
Some purists perceive the use of bolsters and other tools of convenience as a form of cheating, but defenders of the use of apparatus’ assert that it’s safer to use support as long as necessary so the practitioner’s body can learn the poses at its own pace. In the meantime, potential injuries can be averted by using bolsters and other supportive tools that encourage proper body placement.