Yin yoga: A gentle practice that soothes stress and balances emotions

Photo Cred: Cottonbro/Pexels

By Brittany Vargas

Yin yoga is an antidote to the high-pressure, high-stress, fast-paced lifestyles most people live today, said Erin Fleming, RYT-500, owner of Yogadeva International and movement specialist at Bluewave Medicine in Sausalito, California. 

The passive, gentle style of yoga involves holding postures for between two to seven minutes each, often without ever doing a standing posture, she said. As the body slowly unwinds, practitioners focus on the breath and cultivate a deep presence with their thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations as they arise.

Yin has unusual origins for yoga — it was created by yogi and kung fu master Paulie Zink and is influenced by Taoism and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) yin and yang are “the polarities of a whole, the complementary opposites of dark and light, cold and hot, soft and hard, female and male.”

Much of the world orients towards the polarity of yang, said Fleming, noting that yang qualities include striving to achieve outcomes, having an outward focus, and engaging in dynamic activities such as running. On the other hand, yin qualities like introspection, stillness, and surrender are often undervalued or unexplored, she said.

The long-held postures and inward focus cultivate yin qualities while also accessing the yin tissues of the body, said Abbey Morris, RYT-500, yoga teacher specializing in yoga for eating disorders in St. Catherines, Canada. These include the joints, ligaments, fascia, and even the bones.

She said that, unlike other forms of yoga, the goal of yin yoga isn’t to stretch the muscles. It’s to relax them, which facilitates the lengthening of yin tissues like fascia, which can become dehydrated, contracted, and store some of our oldest emotional wounds.

“If we’re chronically stressed, anxious, worried, or if we’ve had a traumatizing experience in our life, we may have some really deeply rooted tension and pain,” Morris said.

Compelling research supports the practice’s potential to heal on multiple levels. A 2018 study published in PLOS One found that five weeks of yin yoga practice reduced “both the physiological and psychological risk factors known to be associated with [non-communicable diseases]” such as cardiovascular disease in study subjects.

Additionally, a yin practice can help with conditions like attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), chronic pain, migraines and headaches, anxiety, depression, and sleep issues, said Morris.

Balancing emotions with yin yoga

One of the biggest ways yin supports emotional wellbeing is by addressing physical manifestations of emotions, said Morris. Painful behavioral patterns and experiences often create physical patterns in the body which may or may not be obvious.

“Different parts of our body store different types of tension,” she said. “We carry a lot of burden and responsibility in our shoulders. If you’re someone who is constantly feeling as though you are responsible for everything, especially things that you can’t control, or responsibilities other people put on you, you may have really rounded shoulders.”

Morris found yin on her road to recovery from an eating disorder. She said that the act of slowing down instead of constantly pushing her body to achieve an outcome was profoundly healing for her, as was the emotional release the practice provides. She now leads yin classes for other women recovering from similar disorders.

“There can be profound moments of release and letting go. It’s not unusual for someone to cry in class unexpectedly, because they have let something go that they’ve been holding on to for a really long time in the form of tension in their body,” Morris explained.

Fleming has also used yin yoga effectively with traumatized populations in her volunteer work at a women’s shelter and with incarcerated youth.

“Simply breathing into sensation can result in a significant outpouring of emotion,” she said. “When trauma is present, the emotional outpouring can be huge,” she added, noting that it’s best for people with significant trauma histories to have social support or other ways to establish emotional safety after a release.

Yet yin yoga is not meant to be painful or upsetting. For most, it’s a gentle practice that acts as a safe haven in a stressful world, she said. She discussed the importance of finding a compassionate edge, the point at which you’re able to feel sensation without going too far.

Morris said that the very act of getting to know what you can and can’t tolerate is revolutionary.

“A lot of us don’t even know where our edge is because we’re so used to pushing and striving and wanting to try as hard as we can to do something. It’s a very transformational experience to acknowledge, ‘Okay, where is my edge? Where is my boundary?’” she explained.

This practice of getting to know one’s self on a deep level is useful off the mat and in the world, she said. It can help one respond more mindfully to a variety of situations, which reduces stress and improves quality of life. 

Research supports this notion. A 2017 study in Anxiety, Stress, and Coping found that a combination of yin yoga and mindfulness significantly reduced stress and worry and increased mindfulness in subjects, even after a five-week follow-up.

Morris explained that the more you train your body to respond in a mindful way, the more it becomes your default way of living.

“We’re building practice for when we go out into the world. The nervous system begins to remember responses [learned in class] and we begin to respond automatically to uncomfortable sensations with breathing or other ways of relaxing. This slows down that transition into fight or fight and gives us a little bit more time to pause and cope,” she said.