Yin Yoga training wrapped yesterday, and what an eye-opening experience it was! I'm taking some time to digest what I've learned. The bottom line is that I’m more convinced than ever that Yin Yoga will be part of my practice as a student and teacher for as many years as I am walking around in this form.
I’ve been trying to suss out what it is about this unassuming practice that has had such an impact. There’s good science behind why Yin Yoga does a body good, but beyond what it does for a body, Yin Yoga can help us steady our minds too.
Some things are not for us to change
Autumn has arrived, and I’m not sure how it looks on your end, but the leaves are falling in my neck of the woods. The other day, we even had to turn on the heat. I'm amazed.
For the last several weeks, I’ve been watching my garden go back to sleep. A part of me rails against the change every year. It’s as though the aliveness of those plants is directly connected to my own aliveness. I have to be reminded that the sleep of fall and winter is necessary for the rebirth of spring. This is not a thing for me to change. No amount of lamentation on my part can keep the leaves green.
Finding acceptance in the yoga practice
In Yin Yoga training, we talked quite a bit about how people process pain. I know it sounds like a conceptual leap to go from talking about fall leaves to discussing pain in practice, but both of these things feel inevitable to me. When you practice, you know there are moments when you might feel some discomfort. It’s a fleeting thing, and if all goes well, we generally feel better after yoga than we did before yoga. Otherwise, why would we come back, right? Discerning whether the discomfort is an okay kind of discomfort or an imperiled limb is something all of us do as students. It’s a sense that we have to develop for ourselves because what feels great for your body might be excruciating in mine.
I might even argue that we couldn’t do without a little discomfort in a yoga class. If our whole schtick is to learn to settle the fluctuations of the mind, one sure way to do this is to create a little turbulence that we must then learn to breathe through.
In vinyasa, we rarely sit with our discomfort for too long. We're challenged, but it's different. In yin, the teacher points you to a target area and he or she makes suggestions for how to get there. At some point, you settle in, and then you’re there for 2-10 minutes. Sure, you can make adjustments, but the idea is that you find stillness. It’s in this space that you can do some of your deepest learning in the physical practice.
In the space of these postures, you can watch the tension grow. Eventually, there’s a full dialogue happening between the thinking mind and the target area. For me it plays out like this: Even though I’m in a position that is completely safe, my brain assigns a value judgment to what’s happening. “That hurts. Pain is bad. Must escape.”
I’m certainly not suggesting that you ignore pain. You’ll find your own definition of movements that feel accessible and ones that don’t, and you should always trust that. It’s just that I noticed my mind would go into this panicked escape mode even when it wasn’t necessary. In fact, it did (and still does from time to time) go into this mode anytime I was left alone with my thoughts in a pose for more than thirty seconds. It’s more pronounced when my anxiety is high or when I’m working through a difficult time with my eating disorder. A mind in this state already feels pretty turbulent, after all.
The power of sitting with it
What I’ve come to realize is that not all feelings of tension are bad. Some of the physical sensations we feel in Yin Yoga happen because the fascia in our bodies is getting “unstuck”. I also learned that I was far too quick to label things as “good” and “bad” when I was practicing. Some things are neither good nor bad. Some things just are.
The empowering thing about all of this has very little with being able to sit through a long hold in Yin Yoga. Through this yoga, we practice noticing the discomfort, sitting with it, allowing it to go away, and observing the ripple effects of what we’ve done. We repeat this over and over so that we develop a kind of sense for it.
When you are able to come up against a challenging situation without getting carried away by a story your mind has made up about the situation, you can find some clarity. In that clarity, there is less suffering. With less suffering, we can find stillness more efficiently, and we can create conditions for stillness in the world around us. In a space continuously rocked by things beyond our control, there’s nothing more precious than having clear eyes for seeing the world. From this space we can best discern how to notice and deploy our own gifts and how to be peace.
Next time you practice
Here’s a little optional homework for you. Next time you roll out your mat, observe what happens when you meet a moment of discomfort. Use your discernment, and if you’ve identified the discomfort as something you can sit with, see what happens. What stories does the mind tell you? What feelings arise? Are you assigning judgment, or can you allow the sensation to be?
There’s no right or wrong in any of this. Maybe your mind has a lot to say. Maybe you cannot allow the sensation to be. Perhaps your capacity to sit with discomfort is actually higher than you realized though. Maybe you do not have to fight so hard all of the time.
Your role is just to observe what happens, respond if necessary, and reflect on it after the fact. You just might be amazed by what you learn through this self-inquiry. I’ll be learning right there with you.
I wish you steadiness, my friends.