* How To Effectively Explore Yin Yoga Asana | 3 Tips
| WRITTEN BY TJ MAHER
| FOUNDER & LEAD TEACHER @ YUJMU
| READING TIME ~5 MIN.
Your body is vast and Yin Yoga can be an amazing tool for exploring it. Our perspective of the practice and our body can make a big difference in the benefits we receive, for this reason some very subtle shifts can be helpful.
This article is intended for both beginners to Yin Yoga and also those who may be well versed in Yin Yoga but are looking for ways to get more from what the practice has to offer you.
What Yin Yoga is teaching us to do is understand our yoga practice and body as simply a process.
Below are 3 areas (plus a bonus))) that I dive very deeply into during the teacher trainings but can also be easily understood as avenues to explore in your personal practice.
Let’s take a look :D
1 | Think of Yin Yoga Asana As Just Sketches
An artist knows that a sketch is not intended to be the final artwork. The term itself implies a casual study or practice, the accumulation of sketches leads to the final result or artwork.
Sketching is an investment in time and an acceptance of a process, this allows artists to not hold a sketch to a lofty standard. What if we could apply this state of mind to our bodies and to our yoga practice?
So what does this mean practically? When you practice don’t try to have some final or finished form to your body.
Let the body tell you where it wants to be. Make more general, gentle, loose explorations of forms and positions.
The form or asana you see in your mind is just an idea, how that idea translates through to your body positioning is much less defined in Yin Yoga.
2 |Yin Has No Alignments; It Has Targets
When navigating a Yin Yoga asana it can be very helpful, even essential, to know where you are going to generally find sensations to work with for that particular pose. The more-or-less predictable areas of sensation are called the Target[s] of that pose.
Targets are not requirements for the pose they are more like landmarks to look for and work with.
If you do not find sensations in the Target area of the body for a particular pose, that is ok, you can choose to adjust yourself until you have sensations in the Target area or you can choose to simply observe and work with the sensations where you do feel them while in that pose.
It is important to not be fooled by this seemingly wishy-washy approach that can seem unstructured.
Knowing and exploring Targets is a way to ground your practice in something tangible, to provide a guide or map with which you can correlate your explorations.
Every body is different, sometimes tremendously different from other bodies, and so that is why these are not rigid rules because Yin Yoga is not intended to be a rigid practice.
None-the-less utilizing Targets as a way of gathering data from your body can be useful. Just as any good Artist knows the rules of their art form before they explore and bend those rules to create something unique,
so too Yin Yoga invites you to know the generality of human anatomy and what positions cause what sensations before exploring to find your body’s unique expression of the form.
3 | Yin Yoga Is A Language Of Sensation
In Yin Yoga practice we are, almost entirely, dealing with sensation, it could even be said that while the language of some Yoga practices is alignment, the language of Yin Yoga is sensation. The reason this is so is because the language of your body is sensation.
Your body is communicating with you, speaking to you, constantly and it is doing this through your experience of the sensations you feel from it.
How do we understand this language or more importantly who are we speaking this language with? Alignment based practices are speaking to anyone who is looking. Sensation based practices, like Yin Yoga, are speaking with our body. You and your body respond to each other in an inner dance, a dialogue that maintains the care and love that our bodies deserve.
Viewed another way Yin Yoga is the practice of becoming intricately, intimately and profoundly attuned with your own body.
The body is an organism that you inhabit, Yin Yoga is about learning to commune in harmony with that organism.
An advanced Yin Yoga practitioner is not measured by some visually impressive flexibility, they are measured by how high a level of refinement or awareness they have of their body’s sensations.
The full realization of learning this language can result in a true symbiosis with your body. We often don’t even consider this thing that we live in our whole life, Yin Yoga nourishes a dialogue with our body.
Bonus | Find Freedom & Play In Your Practice
True dialogue of any kind is not scripted, it is improvised. So even while we have asana, Targets or sensations in Yin Yoga the forms are formless.
Your body is not a robot or product off the assembly line, it is a living thing and no presumed or prescribed parameters supercede its infinite possibilities.
This is where Play comes in, the freedom of play, like dialogue, goes where the imagination takes it.
We may enter an asana through a particular movement but as the feedback from our body comes in we meander subtly through varying manifestations and positions of limbs until we find the sweet spot for that moment.
In the same way an artist may have an intent to draw a certain way but as the sketch unfolds the lines find their own paths. The culmination of this practice is a freedom and playfulness that adults usually can only see in children and must relearn in themselves.
Yin Yoga can be a simple inviting pathway on a long journey back to what we left behind; sketching and playing on the floor as little kids.
“It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”
~Pablo Picasso
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