* 3 Misunderstandings Teaching Yin Yoga
| WRITTEN BY TJ MAHER
| FOUNDER & LEAD TEACHER @ YUJMU
| Reading Time ~6 Min.
Yin Yoga is a rapidly growing style of Yoga with a wonderfully unique methodology for practice. It works in very nuanced and even intuitive ways with our bodies & minds but it can sometimes be misunderstood.
Generally correcting misunderstandings of something is not worth a whole article but I felt this was important. I have heard, often enough, from teachers of Yin Yoga (trained elsewhere) misunderstandings of key concepts.
This is due in part to the expanding interest in Yin Yoga and it leads people to assume their qualifications in other styles of Yoga translates to teaching Yin without training at all or with not enough training.
Yin Yoga is also a practice where its complexity cannot be seen externally, so those untrained may underestimate what is going on.
Let’s take a look at what I consider 3 main misunderstandings of teaching Yin Yoga, how they came to be and some simple, helpful paradigm shifts.
Misunderstanding #1 |
“Yin Yoga is just slowing down regular Yoga poses.”
Nope. This is number one on our list because not only does it result in potentially ineffective practice for Yin Yoga’s intentions but it can also lead to injury.
I think it is sometimes assumed you just slow down “Yoga” to do “Yin Yoga”. Many Yin Yoga asana appear to be duplicates of more traditional yang asana; the styles that are more widespread.
It may be understandable that on first encounters with Yin Yoga asana it can seem that we are just slowing down or long-holding the more active poses that we may know.
However, to use an extreme example, no matter how slow a headstand is performed it will never be an appropriate Yin Yoga pose :)
More practically though there is a grey area of some asana that don’t quite fit the vibe and intention of Yin Yoga but could come close and maybe even fit for a particular person but not at all for most others.
Without proper training a teacher has no basis for identifying what poses are broadly ok for Yin Yoga and what poses are far too risky to present to a class.
Yoga teachers have been well trained in the traditional Yoga asana, their mind and body have a “muscle memory” programmed in, they understand the safety protocols for that style of practice.
Because of this it takes a very deliberate kind of training to overlay, or overwrite, a new methodology and very different Yin Yoga safety protocols to similar positions of the body.
Without a niche training the reflex is to simply apply other methods onto a slower model.
The real crux of Yin Yoga though is the release and avoidance of muscular activation. For safety, Yin Yoga is more about feeling thresholds, rather than adjusting “alignments”.
From this simple shift in perspective Yin becomes a whole different beast and is much easier to understand if we are doing it or teaching it correctly.
A simple example is legs-up the wall pose or what I like to call Waterfall. Sometimes this pose is done away from a wall simply with the legs floating but not leaning on anything. For some bodies this can be maintained in a non-muscular way, for other bodies it is impossible to be in this position without activating the core. With the core activated it no longer is an effective Yin Yoga pose and is more like a static hold for muscle strengthening, similar to a Pilates posture perhaps.
The shift, this difference, is imperceptible visually, making it all the more difficult to convey and teach Yin Yoga properly.
Misunderstanding #2 |
“If I can feel it my students can feel it.”
This misunderstanding likely comes about because the principles of effectively practicing Yin Yoga do not directly translate to effectively teaching Yin Yoga. Basically not all bodies experience similar activities the same way.
In Yin Yoga practice we are trained to listen to our body and learn what it can and cannot do. We base alignments and postures on feeling our unique body signals.
In teaching Yin Yoga we are trained to have a broader sense of the bodies we are guiding. Specifically in teaching you are guiding not prescribed body alignments but you are guiding each student to listen to their own unique body and make their own calculations of positioning themselves for a desired effect.
The issue can then arise that a teacher can become skilled at practicing from their body but then teach too much from that body (their own) and so students will not be analyzing their own sensations properly.
Certain asana may be very comfortable for you to be in at your threshold but may be completely inappropriate for me and my threshold if I try to externally copy your body position.
As teachers, if we do not continually recognize the vast discrepancy of student’s bodies, we may even have poses we think of and speak about either positively or negatively. Without even realizing it we are thereby influencing how our students will experience the pose, simply by how we speak of it based on our own body’s preferences.
A simple example to understand this is considering what injuries we may have that effect how we navigate poses.
Our students may not have those same injuries and aversions to certain poses and may have injuries related to other poses. You can start to see the complexity here and the need for proper training.
Misunderstanding #3 |
“Yin Yoga is just a physical practice.”
or
“Yin Yoga is not a physical practice.”
This one I have seen go both ways and neither view entirely understands the scope of Yin Yoga.
Some view Yin Yoga as a purely inactive or energetic practice like Restorative Yoga or Savasana. This misses Yin Yoga’s emphasis on stretching and compressing tissues and fascia, requiring a very active monitoring and adjusting of the physical body.
Others view Yin Yoga as a purely physical practice of stretching, just getting a physical stretch and benefit. This misses the enormity of the mind and its potential for navigating the inner world, searching, listening, analyzing and facilitating proper adjustments.
So the real intention of Yin Yoga (YINtention), fueling its enormous potential, is the skill of moving freely between these physical and non-physical dimensions of your experience.
The more we practice this, the reflex of tension-release, the more our resting state or default state shifts from one of tension to one of ease.
This can be categorized as an energetic skill, especially when you become familiar with how differently you feel from one state or point-of-view to the other. Yin Yoga reveals your vast potential to influence the interplay of inner experience and physical experience.
Wrapping Up | TL;DR
There is always room for differing styles, opinions, approaches and ideas about practices. I am a firm believer in anything being possible with enough exploration and imagination. I am also always excited to debate and come to more refined understandings together.
Having said that there are thresholds where one thing becomes another or where something very safe becomes ineffective or unsafe.
I hope I set out above a few helpful parameters and expectations when practicing and teaching the thing we call “Yin Yoga” on the studio schedule ;)
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