“As a teacher, you won’t be able to address the specific needs of each individual. However, what you can offer is a creative way of working with posture, breath, intention and attention so that student and customize – within their own experience – a way to nudge their particular pattern, whatever it might be, towards homeostasis.” – Josh Summers
Yin Yoga
Bernie Clark: Beyond the Binary
“You’re flying the plane and have to figure out what works. We – teachers – are just ground control.”
Why Train in Yin Yoga?
Although Yin Yoga looks quite simple, being an effective Yin Yoga teacher is not so simple. There are five primary reasons someone should invest in proper training if they plan to teach others the practice of Yin Yoga. Let’s go over each of them individually.
Bernie Clark: Your Sacroiliac Joint
Bernie Clark shares how his thinking about exercise has shifted from an emphasis on mobility to an emphasis on stability. This is important to how we think about what we’re doing in all forms of physical yoga.
Bernie Clark: Developing and Aging Bodies
In our youth, we’re more Yang and need to work on strength and stability. As we age, we become more Yin, and therefore need to spend more time working on maintaining our mobility.
Bernie Clark: Spinal Neutrality, Symmetry, and Asymmetry
In the second episode of a 4-part series, Yin master Bernie Clark unpacks the important concept of spinal neutrality and he explores how to think about symmetry, functional asymmetry, and dysfunctional asymmetry in the body.
Bernie Clark: Your Spine, Your Yoga
In the first episode of a 4-part series, I welcome Bernie Clark back to the podcast to discuss his new book, Your Spine, Your Yoga. In it, Bernie talks about the main themes in the book including the importance of stability over mobility in the health of our spines.
Chinese Medicine: The Organs, or Zang-Fu
Chinese language tends to describe the Organs and their functions in poetic terms. Their language is metaphorical, often drawing on images from nature and human governance to describe the various processes of human health.
Bernie Clark: Understanding Yin Yoga
Here, Bernie Clark talks about the fascial concepts of dynaments and creep. He discusses some misunderstandings of Yin Yoga, as well as how to think about propping and assisting in Yin Yoga.
Chinese Medicine: What is Essence?
“The best way to affect positively one’s Essence is by striving for balance in one’s life activities: balance between work and rest, restraint in sexual activity and balanced diet. Any irregularity or excess in these spheres is bound to diminish the Essence. A direct way to positively influence one’s Essence is through breathing exercises and such exercises as Tai Ji Quan and Qi Gong.” – Maciocia
Bernie Clark: The Science of Yin Yoga
Listen to Bernie Clark discuss: antifragility, confusion between correlation and causation, the four levels evidence in science, piezoelectricity, and Yin and Yang stress on our tissues. Essential listening for Yin Yoga teachers.
Bernie Clark: Hypermobility and Hyperextension
Many people express concern about issues of hypermobility and hyperextension in Yin Yoga. Here Bernie Clark explores these concerns and logically defends Yin Yoga. Essential listening for Yin Yoga teachers.
Bernie Clark: The Mindset of a Teacher
For yoga teachers, it can be a challenging process to unlearn rigid rules of alignment and to adapt their teaching to the unique experience of their students. Here, Bernie Clark will walk you through how to think about and teach functional alignment in Yin Yoga and beyond.
Yin Yoga: Bitter Practice, Sweet Result
I often get the sense that when students come to a Yin Yoga class they want to feel good throughout the class, start to finish, particularly when it’s a class that seems on the surface to be “gentle” and “quiet” and “meditative”. And yet, that is not the average newcomer’s experience. At some point during the second or third pose of the sequence, newcomers often evince a grimace of distaste and concern. And this needs to be acknowledged.
Yin Yoga: The Universal Donor of Yoga
All too frequently, someone says to me: “I love how Yin Yoga makes me feel… BUT, I couldn’t just do Yin Yoga.” Based on their expression as they say this, I can only assume they think they’ve caught me in some kind of gotcha moment, where they’re exposing a blind spot in my understanding of YinYoga. And much to their surprise, I respond, “Of course, you wouldn’t ONLY practice Yin Yoga. I would never suggest that.”
Yin Yoga: How to Come Out of a Pose
When it is time to come out of a Yin Posture, you may feel a pronounced disinclination to move quickly. Remember: the tissues in the area that you have targeted will be temporarily weakened as a result of the stresses placed upon them during the hold. As such, these targeted areas tend to feel delicate, fragile, vulnerable, and tender. So, because of these kinds of sensations, it’s a good idea to encourage students to also come out of the pose slowly. Or, as I like to cue, “Come out gingerly.”
Yin Yoga: Staying Still For Time
The third principle of Yin Yoga is to stay still for relatively longer periods of time than you would in an active style of yoga practice, such as Ashtanga or Vinyasa Yoga. The question of how long you should hold the posture often surfaces. By now, you may be anticipating my answer. How long you should stay in a posture depends on a few factors: namely, the tolerance level and strength of the tissue being stressed, and the broader intention behind that stress.
Yin Yoga: Relaxing The Muscles
The second aspect of executing a Yin Yoga posture is to relax the muscles in the area that you are targeting. Confusion tends to arise when students hear this instruction to “relax the muscles.” There is a tendency to take this as a global mandate that in Yin Yoga poses ALL muscles everywhere MUST relax, but this is going too far. In practice, you endeavor to relax the muscles primarily in the targeted area that you are influencing. It’s this action of relaxing the muscles that shifts the emphasis of the posture’s stress into the denser connective tissues in and around the muscles and the joints.
Yin Yoga: Playing The Edge
In Yin Yoga, and increasingly in other styles too, there is an emphasis placed on understanding how your body is uniquely influenced by the pose and then from that, making wiser choices about how to align yourself within the pose. How you feel and adapt to what you’re feeling are important elements of Playing Your Edge in Yin Yoga poses.
What Is Yin Yoga?
Yin Yoga is an approach to yoga that is meant to be a complementary style of practice to more active styles of postural yoga. The intentions of Yin Yoga are to stimulate, strengthen, and revive tissues of the body that are not emphasized to the same degree as in active styles of yoga, hence its complementary nature.
Everyday Sublime, The Podcast
This podcast is intended to be a reflection on and for practice. For many years, I’ve signed off my monthly newsletter with the phrase, “From my practice to yours.” What this attempts to convey is that first and foremost, I’m a practitioner – a Yin yogi, an acupuncturist, a meditator. As a practitioner, I’m committed to a process of learning, refining, unlearning, integrating, and developing. I hope that these reflections on my practice help you with yours.
