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.
Everyday Sublime: Shedding Light on Yin Yoga and Meditation
Yin Yoga and meditation are refinements of awareness. The purpose of this podcast is to illuminate the theory and practice of Yin Yoga, Chinese Medicine, and meditation as three interwoven tools for apprehending the Everyday Sublime. As Stephen Batchelor says, "the mystical does not transcend the world, but saturates it."
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.