Yin yoga seems so different from other styles of yoga. When you get onto your mat, you find a shape in your body and then just…stay there. Instead of moving through dozens of shapes, strengthening muscles and building endurance, in a sixty-minute class you only do around seven poses. If you’re already a Yin yoga practitioner, you get it: how it feels in your body, the unique medicine that is Yin yoga. If you’ve never practiced, you might wonder: why spend your practice time doing close to nothing? Does it hurt? Is it supposed to? No matter your experience, you might wonder what is actually happening in your body. Why do you hold the pose for such a long time? 

The 3-5 minutes we spend in each of the Yin yoga shapes is essential to the physical goal of Yin yoga: to move the impact of the pose away from muscle and into the connective tissue. In fact, part of the reason we spend so much time in each shape is so that your muscles give up resistance, relax, and allow the stress of the shape to enter your fascia, which is the connective tissue that surrounds and weaves within every muscles of your body, as well as around your organs, bones, nervous and circulatory systems, and more. 

The connective tissues of your ligaments, tendons, and fascia play many roles in your body. These tissues are structural in nature; they’re stiffer than muscle tissue. By holding your joints together or holding the shape of the muscles themselves, connective tissues reduce the energy output required from your muscles. Interestingly, fascia shrinks around habitual hold patterns. Perhaps your posture or walking gait changed due to an injury or because you spend a lot of time in a particular shape, like sitting at a desk or in a car, or holding a child on one hip. Muscle tissue changes quickly. These connective tissues take more time. 

During the long holds in Yin yoga, the fascia begins to change shape in a process called creep. The cells of the fascia have time to reorient themselves, helping to release restriction in muscles and in between organs, and ultimately to allow a greater range of motion and more slide and glide between tissues in your body. Yin yoga creates the potential to reorganize your body for more efficient, comfortable, and cohesive movement and structure. Yin unsticks your stuck parts. 

In the big picture, Yin yoga is done primarily for the joints of your hips and spin. We want to stress these joints in a safe, slow and controlled way. In order for this good kind of stress to happen, the muscles must be as relaxed as possible. In order for this stress to be beneficial to your connective tissues, we must move slowly and hold the pose for time. For maximum impact to the connective tissues, we practice cold without warming up the muscles first. 

We’ve been keeping the topic to the physical changes that Yin yoga facilitates. Your body is also the messenger of visceral feelings and emotions. Interoception is the felt sense of what’s going on inside of you, and the ability to properly determine what those feelings mean. Interoception has a motivational, affective function – feeling and interpreting these sensations creates motivation to change your behavior and can change your mood and emotions. 

The majority of your interoceptive sensors are in your fascia. Yin yoga has the power to influence more than the physical. This practice opens the superhighway of interoceptive communication from body to brain, at a pace slow enough to register safety in your nervous system. In short, Yin yoga can help you to know yourself better in body, mood, emotion, and mind, and with that knowledge, influence behavioral changes that shift your relationship to the world around you. 

Come to our Yin Yoga 101 workshop to learn more about the science behind Yin yoga, and to practice Yin together. Please bring your inquisitive mind, your questions, and your mat. We’ll spend about 45 minutes in lecture and Q&A, and 75 in practice. And, if you have any particular questions or concerns before the workshop, please send me an email at quinn@openawarenessyoga.com. I’m here as your teacher and would love to help you in your practice.

Sign up for the Yin Yoga 101 workshop here.