Why I Can’t Shut Up About Yin Yoga

**The many benefits of this powerful practice derived from the way of the Taoists**

my new logo inspired by the stories of the Tao and my love for the delicate balance of life. created by my husband and I.

I can certainly admit that I was one of those yogis who started yoga as a vainer practitioner. I saw yoga as a way I could tone my body while avoiding the weight room that I still had PTSD from, from my years as an athlete.

However, yoga is interesting in the way that it doesn’t care about your original why because it knows eventually, you’ll become obsessed in a way that doesn’t serve your physical exterior, but that of your spiritual, connective whole. As I continued my practice and it evolved, so did I in my personal life.

I was still remaining within the bounds of a hatha, vinyasa flow and occasional power class, all the way up until my yoga instructor certification. It was here that I was required to read about yin yoga and practice it daily, that I discovered the power of this separate branch that has inspired me in new ways in my practice and classes I teach.

Yin yoga has an element of difficulty completely separate from your 1 HR Power Bikram Yoga Class. It involves complete stillness of the body and the mind. It is like a meditation except, your body has to sit in what can start off being, a rather uncomfortable position. It is within this stillness that you finally come face to face with the things in your life that trigger a physical, emotional, and spiritual response; and then as your body releases deeper into the posture so does your mind release deeper into a state of healing.

One of my favorite exercises is explaining the emotion-feeling consequence, that occurs in our body every second of the day. Emotions are quite literally “energy in motion” when we feel happy about something there are chemical reactions that occur in our bodies to trigger a feeling, same situation when we experience a sad emotion.

Let’s take the extreme example of a trauma. When we experience trauma in our life from any extreme: our boyfriend breaking up with us to our grandparent passing away and anything far and in between; our emotion is sadness and our feeling consequently is pain, perhaps in the heart, or in the stomach that resembles nausea. Maybe we can’t eat for a few days because our body has released hormones related to suppressing hunger or we cry because our body is releasing stress hormones in our tears and the body does not want us to overload on stress hormone while in this state. These hormonal chemical reactions occur throughout our nervous system and therefore, throughout our body.

A new word for you may be “fascia.” Our fascia acts as a web, like a spider web, comprised of collagen, elastin, and other connective tissues that give our body a shape and hold our organs in their various places throughout our body. It is the web of our life, and it contains a lot of nervous tissue. So, when we experience emotion, and emotion creates a feeling, that feeling is being broadcasted throughout our fascia and that energy can get stuck, especially if we suppress our emotions or try to move on from a painful experience too quickly.

Yin yoga postures target this deep fascia and gives it the release it needs to finally let go and open up; in a musculature and emotional sense.

Some cultures call it the sacred pause. It's within that pause, or moment of stillness, that we come back to our inner- most essence. By dropping into this stillness, we find our center.

This energy fluctuates in our life constantly, obviously we are always experiencing some sort of emotion or we would not be human. Yin practice allows us to be better at handling these fluctuations in the body; as Chinese Medicine details, health is the delicate balance of yin and yang.

“In a gentle way, you can shake the world.” – Gandhi

` The Taoists from China were the originators of yin yoga. Taoism is a philosophical path that dates back to 550 BCE in China. Tao means “the way, or the path.” There are plenty of stories in China that describe the Taoists as magicians or sorcerers who were able to perform superhuman abilities.

Taoist practices were the first to explain to us about yin and yang. They explained how the laws of nature govern our lives primarily, when we fight with these laws we create suffering, whereas, when we are aligned, we tap into invincibility.

tao, taoists, taoism, chinese taoists — Taoists in China.

They discovered the undercurrent of energy and vibration that comprises every being made of matter on Earth. It is from this original theory, that Einstein later theorized that the ultimate stuff of the universe is pure energy. According to this theory we are all just dancing energy.

“Yin” is Chinese for female, moon, darkness, and shade and “Yang” is translated to sun, male, and light. The Taoists drew this meaning from the absence and presence of sunlight on a mountain slope. The symbol derived from this meaning demonstrates how all things in the world of form and duality have a polar nature. Everything has an opposite: male and female, light and darkness, sun and moon, hot and cold, and positive and negative.

Part of being human is learning to attain balance in this dance of constant change—with yin and yang. Our lives mirror duality as we experience gain and loss, pleasure and pain, praise and blame, and life and death. This is the nature of the Tao and the essence of yin yoga.

All types of yoga are necessary to practice; like the Tao it is all about balance. As we yang we must also yin. Every practice has different benefits for us to reap, and in yin we can really develop strengths mentally and physically that will allow us room for more growth in all forms of yoga.

Yin yoga has been described as a fountain of youth. As we grow older, naturally, we lose flexibility, circulation is inhibited, and tissues begin to atrophy and deteriorate as our bodies stop creating more collagen. This process is actually easily reversed through a steady yin practice! In yin yoga, we activate deeper connective tissues through the long, deep stretching postures while also exerting positive pressure on them to maintain lubrication in the muscles and density in the bones.

In yin yoga you are holding particular poses for almost 5 minutes, whereas in other styles of yoga you may come out of the stretch after 30 seconds. Although these styles are beneficial in other ways, this length of stretch limits the benefits discussed that one can gain from a longer stretch..

These long holds during yin yoga also trigger the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) to turn on, versus the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) that is fed during more active yoga practices.

The PNS being turned on allows for regulation of the following in our body:

- Energy recovery, regeneration, repair, and relaxation

- Stimulate flow of saliva for digestion

- Slows the heartbeat

- Stimulates the release of bile

- Contracts the bladder

- Activates assimilation and elimination

- Improves immune function

- Regulates liver, kidneys, pancreas, spleen, stomach, small intestine and colon, parathyroid hormone and bile, and pancreatic and digestive enzyme

- Overall contentment and gratitude

Now who wouldn’t want ALL these benefits?

A traditional yin yoga practice can be longer than others; sometimes up to an hour. It typically flows with a light warm up for the body for about 5 minutes and then a series of around 8-12 yin poses each held for 3-5 minutes.

There are 3 simple laws of a yin yoga practice.

1. Find Your Edge: do NOT go past the point where you can start feeling the stretch. Eventually you will get to your desired flexibility but always be kind to your body first and do not push yourself past your edge.

2. Find Stillness: Once you find the edge and settle into the pose, put all your focus on your breath and within yourself. This doesn’t mean you cant adjust yourself if you start feeling uncomfortable, but strive to reach a meditative state where you can relax into the pose.

3. Let Time Flow: the point of yin is to spend a considerable amount of time in a pose in a concentrated way, not how many poses you complete in a class. The strength of the yin practice is the ability to let time flow.