Everyday Sublime: Shedding Light on Yin Yoga and Meditation

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.

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.

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.