What is yin yoga and why might you decide to add it to your schedule of fitness activities? You won’t get a cardio workout or burn hundreds or calories as you might in a powerful yang yoga practice, but you will begin to tune into your body, train your attention, and learn to stay with some discomfort – a bit like life.
The practice of yin yoga is actually quite new. In Yin yoga we do long passive holds, which put gentle pressure on tissues, joints, ligaments, and bone. This leads to increased flexibility, mobility, and lubrication.
When joints don’t move, the ligaments tend to shrink, and this reduces range of motion. By holding a pose at the “edge” of our comfort zone where we feel strong physical, and likely, mental sensation, we put healthy stress on the elastic tissues and encourage the flow of energy (qi), fluids, and blood. All of this internal activity lubricates and encourages healthy repair of the tissues, which gradually wear down through regular wear and tear. Increased production of synovial fluid in the joints, and hyaluronic acid within the connective tissue, helps to repair collagen fibers and slow degeneration.
Yin and yang are opposites: yin examples are night, slow, quiet, dark, moon, feminine. Some examples of yang are day, fast, loud, light, sun, masculine. You cannot have yin without yang, or yang without yin. They balance one another. When yin and yang are in balance in the body, and the mind, we find harmony and health. When they are out of balance, too little of one, not enough of the other, there is disharmony and disease.
When we practice yin yoga we are practicing a form of meditation. We become very still and bring attention to the breath, as well as, to the sensations that we feel in the body – pulling, stretching, tingling; the temperature of the body – feeling cooler, or warmer. We also notice the fluctuations of the mind, the thoughts that come, that we practice noticing, and then letting go, rather than becoming wrapped up in the story those thoughts want to tell us. We practice coming back to the breath and the sensations each time we notice our mind has strayed.
Adding yin yoga to a fitness regime can be a difficult step for some of us to take. It’s hard to give ourselves permission to slow down. It may not seem to fit with our concept of “physical fitness”. The beauty of it is, that it adds a new and diverse layer of health to the physical body, the mental, and emotional body. Give yin a try – allow yourself to slow down, get intimate with your breath, and feel the sensations that flow and spill through every crevice of your amazing body.
Have you already tried yin? Do you practice? Tell me about your experience! Let’s chat.
MSH Yoga 