That’s the question I asked my friend the first time I was invited to take a Yin Yoga class back in 2018. The name “Yin Yoga” implies that there will be something of stillness in this practice. My mind made the immediate leap to things like Restorative Yoga and Yoga Nidra. I figured that there’s really nothing new under the sun, and someone had just rebranded restorative.
At that time, I practiced with a desire to get strong. I had energy to burn, and frustrations to vent, so I generally preferred the Vinyasa and Hatha. When presented with the idea of slowing down for an hour, I will admit that I balked. My friendship outweighed my reluctance and impatience, though, and I decided to give Yin a try.
What I found was an offering unlike any yoga I practiced before. I love a good challenge, but articulating what exactly Yin Yoga is without having gone through the upcoming training See the details at the end of the email.) stretches my explanatory skills to their utmost. Still, I want to try because maybe there’s another reluctant slower-downer or another perpetually curious student who might benefit from the attempt. Here’s what I can tell you.
Yin Yoga is slow
This one assumption I made about Yin Yoga is correct. The practice is way slower than Vinyasa and Hatha. Rex was telling me about a Yin sequence he taught the other day that consisted of 6 poses. Yes, he led students through six poses in an entire class! You might practice that many poses in under 2 minutes in a brisk Vinyasa class. In Yin, you generally hold poses for two to ten minutes.
Yin Yoga is intense
Don’t let the pace give you the impression that Yin Yoga is easy. I find it much more difficult and intense than Vinyasa. When I get uncomfortable in a Vinyasa class, I don’t worry about it too much. We’ll be on to the next thing in no time, so I just move on and make adjustments. With Yin, though, it’s not so simple. You may be in a pose for five minutes, and while you do still have the option (as always) to move as needed, the idea is that you’ll find a place to get still.
Being bullheaded and inexperienced, I often made the mistake of going to my maximum range of motion all the time in Yin, only to find out that that’s not the best practice. It’s one thing to know where the edge is and to visit, but if you’re planning on hanging out there for minutes at a time, your body and your mind are going to start a dialogue. That dialogue might be peppered with four-letter words. I know that doesn’t sound yogic, but I’m being honest here. Yin yoga teaches you where the edge of your mobility and your tolerance is. It challenges your ability to balance effort and ease more than any of the other practices.
At the same time, Yin Yoga was the first modality I turned to when I was recovering from my surgery earlier this year. I found that my convalescing body was much better able to handle the type of challenge presented by Yin compared to my usual Hatha practice. In other words, Yin Yoga offers you an opportunity for slowness and softness, but it’s no slouch either.
You have to sit with yourself
This was a hard one for me. Now I really love a slow, strong Hatha class because there’s time for contemplation, but early in my time as a practitioner, I didn’t leave much room for the other limbs of yoga. I only cared about breathwork insofar as it helped me get strong. I didn’t do much in the way of meditation.
The reason for all of this was that I didn’t like myself, I had a lot of mental health baggage from my eating disorder, and I didn’t want to deal with it. That’s not a cry for help or anything. It’s just how it went for me, and how I’m sure it must be for many people working through their stuff. (I know someone reading this gets it.) I didn’t want to sit there and watch the thoughts careen off the inside of my mind while I attempted to find ease in the stillness. Recovery is like that.
Luckily, I feel a lot better these days, and one of the reasons for that is that I needed to do that work as I became well enough to engage in that way. If you have a hard time sitting to meditate, Yin Yoga might be a thing for you to try. In my experience, it was easier than sitting totally still, but it was more difficult than shifting from movement to movement.
Yin Yoga has a different focus
When I say focus here, I’m talking specifically about how Yin Yoga works within the physical body. When we think about practices we might consider to be yang (though nothing in yoga is entirely yin or yang) in nature, we often talk about muscular engagement and movement. Your teacher may literally give you an instruction like, “Engage your quads.”
In Yin Yoga, the teacher will name a target area, but you’re not really looking to engage muscles at all. That’s because Yin Yoga focuses on fascia and ligaments, and to get to those, you often have to release muscular engagement. Fascia was the stuff that got in the way of looking at muscle groups in the early days of anatomy studies. Now we know that this thin connective tissue is a whole network in and of itself.
More importantly for our purposes, these tissues can get stiff and feel stuck, but Yin Yoga can help us feel a little freer. This is so hard to describe, but when I started practicing Yin Yoga, there were points within the practice when I could feel myself getting unstuck. It was like someone was slowly peeling apart Velcro. I’d been carrying this stuck feeling around, and it was causing me all kinds of general stiffness and discomfort. Sometimes I came out of Yin Yoga feeling taller or feeling like I just got out of a massage. I can’t tell you that’s what it’ll be like for you, but I encourage you to give Yin Yoga a try and see what sensations arise.
Practice Boldly
Maybe you’ve looked at Yin Yoga, and you’ve thought, “Too slow for me.” Maybe you’ve looked at Vinyasa and figured, “This body doesn’t yoga.” If you’re in either camp, consider giving Yin Yoga a try. You’ll be challenged either way and even if you don’t love it, maybe… just maybe… you’ll learn a thing or two about who you are and what you need from your practice.