If you’ve ever tried yin yoga you’ll know that even though it’s extremely slow moving, it’s one of the hardest forms of yoga to do. Yin yoga is a series of poses (seated) that are held for about five minutes at a time.
Here are some examples of yin yoga poses (all of the poses shown here are held for about 5-10 minutes each).
While in most other forms of yoga poses are held not only physically and mindfully but with the use of bondas (or firmness of certain areas of the body). The difference in yin is that instead of placing ourselves into a pose and mindfully remaining strong, we relax into the pose. For example pigeon pose (or swan pose in yin yoga) usually requires us to firm our back leg, firm our front foot activating the front leg, and breathing into the pose for five to ten breaths, in yin your feet are relaxed, and while your thighs and hips will not be at first (they might be tight or uncomfortable) the point of yin yoga is to find relaxation in the pose, or to find comfort in the discomfort. If you’ve ever tried sitting in one position (cross-legged even) for an extended period of time, not moving, focusing on your breath, and trying not to allow your brain to wander, you will know that yin yoga is not fun, not fun at all.
Here are my reasons why:
1. It’s uncomfortable most of the time.
– sitting with this discomfort is torture at times. In yin you are asked to stay in a pose for sometimes ten minutes. Most of the poses are hip openers and are meant not only to get to the deep connective tissues but to also deal with why we are tight in the first place (physically and emotionally).
2. It’s difficult not to wander
– In my first class I swore the instructor (a good friend of mine) forgot to tell us to get out of the pose, I looked up, to see if I had not heard her, or if she had wandered off in her thoughts like I had. She hadn’t, it was meant to last a tortuous amount of time. I even had the classic Elaine Benes freak out on the subway (Seinfeld episode) except on my yoga mat.
3. A lot of emotions come up
By sitting with ourselves for that amount of time and accepting whatever happens – be it an Elaine Benes rant, crying, anger, making plans in our heads, hating yin yoga – without judgements allows us to eventually let go. Granted this might not happen the first time you try it, but it will, if you can gather up the guts to try yin yoga again. (It took me over a year to try it again).
There were many reasons why it took me so long to try Yin yoga again, one of them being it is not fun at all, and another being I wasn’t ready to see yoga as physically passive yet emotionally juicy. If you follow any yoga blogs, or webpages, you’ll notice that many people try to define yoga –
yoga is not a work out
Yoga is a work out
Core yoga/butt yoga/weight loss yoga
if you don’t sweat it’s not yoga
yoga is a sport
yoga is a spiritual experience
I used to define yoga, and I still catch myself doing so at times. But something I have come to realize recently is that none of these statements are true. In this last year I have strived to try as many forms of yoga as I could. And because of that I have learned that there is no one way to do yoga, and you can’t categorize it as good or bad, authentic or inauthentic, because the reality is yoga is a lot of things. On any given day yoga can be spiritual, it can be rejuvinating, it can be a work out, and it can also be yin. Yoga is what you need it to be.
Today I needed it to be yin. My emotions have been crazy these last few days (mostly due to my cycle but also the many changes, and changes within changes, taking place). In one minute I could be a-ok and in the next I could be completely PMSing, or panicking in my head about the lack of time, organization of the military – you name it, I’ve panicked about it in the last few days. I couldn’t concentrate, I felt lost and stressed and I was beginning to have no trust in any of my abilities. And so I decided to sit with myself this morning. Feel the burn and force myself to just be.
That’s what yin does: there is no flow to keep up with, no mastering of a pose, there is just you and your joints. There are no adustments to make you seem bendy, you can’t pretend that you don’t have tight hips, or that you can do wide legged forward fold (seated), you are forced to accept these things, and you see by letting go, that these things don’t really matter because if you were to define yoga it wouldn’t be a work out or a spiritual experience, it would just be yoga, yoga is in everything, in every movement, any BODY can do yoga, and when you finally see that, you realize yoga is just connection, union. When you finally allow yourself to let go in a yin pose you realize that even though you can’t even partially do turtle pose (me this morning) the fact that you sat with it and let yourself experience the moment (cry), accept it, but not let it define you, you’ve done it, you’ve welcomed yoga into your life.
For me Yin yoga is about connecting with yourself, allowing yourself to feel whatever it is you need to feel. When sitting in an uncomfortable position for five minutes you have no choice but to eventually feel, eventually get to what is hidden deep in your tissues. A year ago this is definitely not how I would have defined yin yoga, because back then yoga was different in my life. Don’t let others tell you what yoga is, or who can do yoga, let it be what it is for you in this moment, and one day you’ll find yourself sitting in a random pose letting yourself cry it out and you’ll see just how mystifying yoga can be.
Living yoga in a military wife's life 