* Yin Yoga & Qi | For Beginners
| WRITTEN BY TJ MAHER
| FOUNDER & LEAD TEACHER @ YUJMU
| Reading Time ~2.5 Min.
[A VERSION OF THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED WITH OUR Friend Aroha Yoga.]
One of the most underrated and amazing qualities of Yin Yoga is its ability to train your awareness of Qi. Let’s explore a bit of what is meant by the term Qi and how it relates to Yin Yoga.
Yin Yoga In A Nutshell
Yin Yoga is a style of practice where the body remains still and on the floor during long held stretches.
This context allows the mind to hone in on more subtle sensations that would likely be overlooked if the body was moving or coordinating balance in standing postures.
Because of this opportunity, during Yin Yoga practice, to focus the attention on particular and often precise sensations for long periods of time it allows the practitioner to actually study the characteristics of those sensations.
Over time if practiced regularly this subtle experience of the body becomes familiar and very subtle sensations can be recognized even while moving in other practices.
What Does That Have To Do With Qi?
Qi (also spelled “Chi”) is a term that requires some linguistic acrobatics to understand as it crosses from Eastern cultures into Western cultures. This cultural transmission is one reasons why it can so easily get misunderstood.
First dear reader let go for a moment any previous notions you have of Qi just so we can start from a shared baseline. If you have seen pictures trying to depict Qi or read translations of the term discard all of that for the moment.
Now consider that Qi is simply a highly refined awareness of very subtle sensations in and of the body.
From this body-sensation view of Qi you can now “look” for Qi, “work” with Qi and feel what Qi is. The only obstacle being how refined can you become in your awareness of sensations in your body?
Your body never switches off, the senses are always taking in data and input. We often have a coarse awareness of this stimuli and so we have only a clunky, coarse awareness of Qi.
Working with Qi begins with developing your awareness of your body’s feedback signals which are instigated from both external and internal sources.
Yin Yoga is remarkably well suited for refining this awareness over days and months of regular practice.
Wrapping Up | TL;DR
Yin Yoga is like a controlled laboratory for this process of tapping into subtle sensations of the body. When practiced a certain way, with certain intentions Yin Yoga is an ideal doorway into understanding Qi and your body in ways that few other practices can achieve.
This body awareness can prove to be an invaluable tool in such examples as; preventing an injury before it happens while exercising or adjusting our habits before an illness has taken hold or before a suboptimal choice has gone too far.
In conclusion, a long term practice of Yin Yoga, with an emphasis on Qi awareness, can help us to feel what is going on within and make choices about how to respond to our body and the signals it is communicating far sooner than we could before we were regularly refining our sense of our body.
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