We live in a culture that encourages us to constantly expand our capacity and do more.
Get out of your comfort zone.
Balls to the wall.
Hustle and grind.
When you reach a sticking point, push through.
There’s another way.
The practice of yin yoga teaches us to expand through stillness.
In yin yoga, when you meet resistance from your body while getting into a pose, you stop where the sticking point is. Instead of pushing through, you hold it for time.
In the stillness, time and gravity do their job.
It’s that time in stillness that scares more people away from the yin practice. As I often remind my students, yin is not the practice of comfort. This is not restorative yoga, which I often call “naps on blocks.”
A yin practice is not about “finding what feels good.” It’s a practice of learning how to be with what is not comfortable.
In yin yoga, you use the breath to soften from the inside. Eventually, the body releases a little.
In the body during a yin practice, letting go is not an action. It’s a result that comes from staying present to what is happening in the body.
As I remind my students every week, it takes a lot of strength to find stillness in the discomfort of chaos. It’s the true power practice of yoga.
When chaos erupts, do you seek solace with someone who is constantly on the move, always “pushing through”? Or do you want someone who can hold ground when the ground is shifting?
Yin yoga teaches us that we don’t have to push through. With time, breath, and a little pressure, things will shift and release.
The yin practice is the perfect practice for Scorpio season.
Scorpio season is the season of yin. It’s a yin sign. It’s a fixed water sign.
Astrologer Austin Coppock interprets fixed water as water than is channeled to flow in one direction, such as water that flows through a pipe. Over time, water properly channeled will hollow out a stone.
This is yin.
Another way to interpret fixed water is the still waters at the bottom of a body of water.
This is also yin. It’s in the stillness that the body releases and relaxes.
The practice of yin yoga reveals the strengths of Scorpio.
Scorpio knows how to remain still in times of perceived crisis and chaos. It can hold space for grief, sadness and discomfort, because it has been to the depths of its own.
It knows that releasing what no longer serves does not need to be an overt action; it’s just something that happens naturally when we allow ourselves to find the depths of stillness.
If you want to embody the energy of Scorpio season, practice yin yoga.
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