3 Ways to Use Yin Yoga For Release
Learning to let go has become a life task for most people, including myself.
Although I have several certificates saying that I am a yoga teacher, this does not mean that I have also mastered all the difficulties which come across in life. I have been a yoga practitioner for many years and every time I think I’ve learned something about the ability to let go, something else comes up and shows me how much I still have to learn.
It sounds so simple, yet it is so hard to do. We hold onto our fears, our anger and sorrow without realizing that, by doing this, we are losing our ease in life. Practicing Yin Yoga was a great help to me when it came to learning how to let go more easily.
Let Go in Your Body
When you enter into a Yin Yoga pose you have to let go on a physical level. It is not a good idea to keep the muscles in the pose active over a period of several minutes because it will only make you feel more tension. In a Yin pose you are asked to passively sink into it as much as your body will allow.
Let Go in Your Breath
Once you’ve learned to relax your body, you will notice your breath flowing effortlessly with more and more ease and tranquility. You don’t have to think about your breath flow anymore, so just let it come and go without directing it.
Let Go in Your Mind
This will eventually lead to stillness of the mind. When you start diving into your own silence you begin to realize what you are clinging on to: all the unnecessary worries of the past and the anxieties about the future. Maybe you’ll feel that you are tensing up again in your body as these thoughts arise. As you remember to sink deeper into your Yin pose, and let the tensions in your body go by connecting to your breath, you will be able to let these thoughts go as well.
Coming out of a Yin pose, and shifting back to neutral in your body, will leave you with a feeling of lightness and ease. Once you realize how good it feels to let go of the things that don’t serve you in life, you will probably want to practice it more often. Practice Yin Yoga and start experiencing the happiness you really deserve.
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Have Niche Yoga Styles Taken It Too Far?
What does yoga look like when no one is looking?
The answer to the question depends on who we are watching. What yoga looks like can vary widely, especially because there are 4 main kinds of yoga: The yoga of intelligence (jnana), the yoga of devotion (bhakti), the yoga of service (karma), and hatha yoga which is the one we think of when we see people doing downward dog. Yoga for one person may look like studying scripture and attending dharma talks. While for someone else, it’s doing service to their community without expectation of getting anything in return.
For another individual, yoga is chanting and repeating the same kriya for an hour every single day. Someone doing an hour-long physical yoga class, breathing, resting at the end, and saying “OM” might be more of what we’ve come to recognize yoga as today. So whether sitting silently on a cushion for hours or doing plank while drinking a microbrew, we can technically call it yoga.
If you ask someone in the East, someone in the West, someone today, and someone from the past, their answers can vary as widely as the styles of yoga offered. So is any of the yoga we see taking it too far?
