Yin Yoga 101: Don't Miss Out!—6 Reasons Why You Should Try this Practice

Want to learn a style of yoga that’s focused on bringing balance—physically, energetically, and mentally? Join Josh Summers, founder of the Summers School of Yin Yoga, for our new online course Yin Yoga 101—a six-week journey through the foundations and principles of Yin Yoga, along with asana and meditation practices. If you’re new to Yin, you’ll finally have the expert guidance you need to use this transformational yoga style to explore new dimensions of your body, energy, and mind. And if you’re already a Yin fan, Josh’s course will refine your knowledge and give you the tools to deepen your practice. Learn more and sign up today!

6 Reasons You Should Try Yin Yoga

1. You’ll discover the other half of yoga.
If your go-to yoga practice is active—Ashtanga, Bikram, power, Iyengar, vinyasa—carving out time for Yin will noticeably improve it. Thanks to Yin’s signature commitment to mindfully holding poses, you’ll have a better sense for your body and what you’re feeling as you move on the mat. Yin’s tension-melting poses also will help you move with greater ease, grace, and fluidity in your active style.

2. You’ll learn how to release deep tension.
The knot you feel in your neck isn’t just muscle tension. It’s also your fascial network being out of whack. Lots of things cause your fascia—the intricate webbing that encases your muscles—to contract: stress, injury, inflammation. Then your mobility and ranges of motion decrease. Yin Yoga safely regains and maintains your healthy ranges of motion by releasing the contracture in your fascia.

3. Energy (Qi) will move better throughout your body.
Qi, your vital energetic life force in Traditional Chinese Medicine, circulates throughout your body but can become blocked or stagnant, particularly in the joints, causing pain or degeneration. Acupuncture stimulates many key points of transition at joints, helping the Qi flow more smoothly. In a similar way, Yin Yoga gently stresses joints, unblocking stuck energy. When your Qi flows smoothly, as it will after a Yin Yoga practice, you’ll feel a sense of spontaneous ease.

4. You’ll be able to soothe your nerves and slow down.
Yin Yang theory is about a balancing process of change whereby things cycle between a restful, inward state (yin) and an active, outward state (yang). Yin Yoga stimulates the yin side of that equation, the parasympathetic nervous system, encouraging slowing down and becoming calm in order to rest and renew. Failure to attend to this side of ourselves can lead to burnout.

5. You’ll effortlessly create a meditative state—and naturally learn how to meditate.
Staying relatively still in Yin Yoga postures for several minutes will both physically prepare you to sit in a meditation posture and teach you the fundamental dynamics of how meditation works. You’re able to bring a yin quality of mind—receptivity—to your experience on the mat. Rather than trying to control your mind and focus it on something specific, you can find a stillness of being within the middle of whatever experience you might be having.

6. You’ll feel more balanced.
You find a fantastic balance between yin and yang qualities in your being when your body releases deep tension, your Qi flows smoothly, and soft receptivity tempers your mind’s striving. That means you’ll emerge from a practice of Yin Yoga, calm and clear, able to move, think, and act from a place of balanced poise.