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When you apply yin yoga, chances are high you’re conversant in the proliferation of artistic, fanciful, and generally foolish names for the poses. Cat Pulling Its Tail. Marauding Bear. Twisted Roots. Dragon with Open Wings. Sleek Bow. Upswan.
Many college students and lecturers, together with myself, discover this to be an endearing side of the apply. However the array of yin yoga pose names could be dizzying. What one trainer calls a Resting Frog one other trainer introduces as Lazy Lizard. It could looks like each time you attend class, you be taught a brand new title.
This may lead one to marvel, can anybody invent a yin yoga pose and provides it no matter title they need?
Just about.
In a way, while you’re training yin, you’re co-creating the pose. The trainer will assist information you to search out the posture, however in the end you’re the one individual experiencing your physique—the one one who actually is aware of the place, and to what diploma, you’re experiencing the feeling. Is it tolerable? Is it one thing you’ll be able to sit with for some time? Or is there a pointy ache in your knee reasonably than the supposed goal of your hip?
Yin invitations you to interact with these questions. How does it really feel? What’s my physique telling me? Does adjusting the form higher enable me to melt and lean in? On this means, yin will increase our capability to sense, really feel, and meet ourselves. The exterior form turns into a container for the act of inner quiet and profound listening.
Meaning there isn’t a single alignment that’s appropriate. There are a lot of doable shapes, totally different orientations to gravity, and countless little tweaks to make sure there’s a model of every pose for each physique. As a result of our our bodies are totally different from each other, while you prioritize discovering your excellent stretch, you’ll possible end up in a distinct form than the individual on the neighboring mat.
Yin yoga is a comparatively newer apply, one which has gained in reputation over the past couple a long time thanks largely to yin lecturers Paul and Suzee Grilley, who made a acutely aware resolution to not use Sanskrit names. They needed to distinguish yin postures from the normal yoga asana, or poses, that you just expertise in a vinyasa class.
This resolution was additionally made, partially, to emphasise that in yin yoga, the form of a pose is secondary to its operate. It’s not about how a pose appears to be like, or what it’s known as, however the way it feels.
The yin yoga model of Pigeon Pose (Eka Pada Rajakapotasana), for instance, is practiced with the intention of concentrating on the hip joint and gluteal area. Practitioners would not have to sq. their hips and attempt to kind a 90-degree angle with their entrance leg for the posture to profit. So the Grilleys selected to name this form Sleeping Swan. Swan resembles Pigeon however is extra permissive. Swan doesn’t care should you sq. your hips or collapse off to the facet. Swan’s high-quality in case your again leg is bent or your physique is rotated. Swan merely needs you to stretch your butt and chill out right into a meditative house.
This continued experimentation of training in keeping with our personal sensations inevitably results in the creation of latest shapes—and new names. Many yin lecturers, like me, are all in regards to the foolish or the literal or something that can assist college students perceive the form and its underlying useful intention. The yin group’s frequently evolving lexicon of names is solely proof of that. Resting Half Frog. Cobbler. Damaged Wing.
Almost twenty years into this apply, I’m nonetheless discovering this revelation by my very own physique and by studying from my college students. That is what occurs when there’s freedom to discover each doable form.
So the subsequent time you’re training a yin yoga pose and, in an effort to find simply the suitable sensation, you end up morphing from a Mermaid into one thing that strikes you as extra of a Facet-Mendacity Sloth, know that you just’re doing it precisely proper.
