Do you experience an immense rush, as if time is running out and you are missing out on life? Do you attach your self-worth to the rate at which you accomplish your goals? Do you want to slow down, take a deep breath and pause but don’t know how to? Yin yoga might be what you need right now!
A modern form of yoga rooted in Daoism, Yin Yoga is growing in popularity because of its effects on physical, mental, and emotional well-being. In this increasing yang world with its hustle culture, fear of missing out, and a never-ending list of to-dos, we cannot afford not to tap into our yin side to find balance and harmony.
Principles of Yin Yoga
- Play your Edges: Yin Yoga consists of poses that are held passively for some time. As you move into the posture, you mustn’t push to go deeper but rather accept the first point of resistance and hold there for a while. If your body allows further movement, you will only move deeper into the range of motion. If you experience pain, then you gently step back a little. This awareness of understanding the various sensations and navigating the practice is known as playing the edges in Yin Yoga.
- Become still: Once you have found your first edge, you must cease all bodily movements. The body’s complete stillness allows the stress to dig deeper into the connective tissues and achieve greater body awareness. Bodily stillness leads to the breath becoming soft and effortless, essential for the mind to settle into stillness. You can, however, break this stillness if you want to go deeper in a posture or move out of it when the discomfort becomes too much to bear.
- Hold: Perhaps the most crucial principle of yin yoga is holding time. The passive postures are held for at least three to five minutes to allow the body to open up gradually. The tension only reaches the deeper layers of fascia and other connective tissues when there is a consistent, gradual pressure in a pose. If it feels too challenging to be still for long due to physical tension, you can use props such as blocks and bolsters to support you better.
Benefits of Yin Yoga
- Improves connective tissue health: At a physical level, yin yoga targets the deeper connective tissues, such as fascia, tendons, and ligaments. Connective tissue degeneration is widespread as we age, and they are more prone to injuries. Relaxing the muscles fully, as in yin yoga, stresses these tissues safely, making them more functional. Consistent practice can improve joint mobility.
- Increases flexibility: One significant benefit of yin yoga is increased range of motion. Studies have shown that almost 40% of our flexibility comes not from the muscle but from the fascia. Stiffness in fascia can compromise joints and lead to chronic pain. Holding yin postures gently releases resistance and tension from the fascia, making you flexible with consistent practice.
- Releases stuck emotions: Our body has memories of our experiences, especially the unprocessed ones. Our responses to these circumstances are stored in the body as stuck emotions, which we experience as pain, stiffness and tension. Our hips, especially, are believed to store trauma. Yin yoga mainly targets the lower body- hips, back and legs- allowing you to purge these intense emotions, consciously or unconsciously. This is why you could feel much lighter after a yin session.
- Enhances mind-body connection: Yin yoga is a meditative practice that gives you the time to reap both physical and mental benefits. As you stay still in a posture, you can become aware of the various sensations in the body and your mind’s response to these sensations. You can connect with your body’s wisdom by noticing how your breath influences your body and vice versa.
- Strengthens mindfulness: Yin Yoga can help improve awareness by bringing your attention to the present. You can practice grounding by building a mind-body connection and anchoring yourself to the breath. You also become sensitive to the influence of your surroundings and better realise how your environment positively or negatively impacts you.
- Creates free chi flow: Chi is the vital life force energy that creates, sustains, and nourishes our being at all levels—physical, astral, and causal. Yin yoga asanas open up the meridian lines, the channels through which chi flows. Stagnant chi leads to various illnesses, such as chronic pain, inflammation, and autoimmune diseases.
- Improves organ health: As you do yin asanas and stimulate the meridian lines, you build organ health by regulating the chi flow to these parts. This also helps balance your emotional health, as each organ system has an associated emotion that is overly expressed or suppressed when not in harmony. Yin Yoga gently massages all the vital organs and improves physical and emotional well-being.
- Reduces stress: Focusing on holistic health can help you manage stress better. Today, most of our stressors come from poor lifestyle habits like unhealthy eating and sleeping patterns, too much workload, disharmony in relationships, etc. The root cause of all these behaviours is an inability to feel safe in the body. Mindfully moving in asanas teaches you to cultivate safety and health in the body, which becomes your grounding force to handle stress in life.
- Improves sleep: While yin yoga and restorative yoga are not the same, yin yoga does have a relaxing impact on the body. Especially when practiced in the evenings as part of your wind-down routine, you can observe significant improvement in the quality of sleep. Both physical and mental tension melt away as you become still in a posture, making it one of the best practices for sleeping troubles such as insomnia, nightmares, disturbed sleep, etc.
- Bring harmony and balance: Balance is the law of nature. Too much of anything is harmful. Too much of yang around us calls for our yin side to be more active. Without harmony between these two forces, we experience chaos and confusion, leading to feelings of anxiety, depression, lack of motivation, and no sense of direction. Learn to slow down, you will progress faster!
Yin Yoga is a powerful practice that you should include in your routine. Practicing it atleast 2x a week will significantly improve your overall well-being.
