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For those who apply yin yoga, chances are high you’re accustomed to the proliferation of inventive, 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 academics, together with myself, discover this to be an endearing side of the apply. However the array of yin yoga pose names might be dizzying. What one instructor calls a Resting Frog one other instructor introduces as Lazy Lizard. It will probably looks like each time you attend class, you study a brand new identify.
This may lead one to marvel, can anybody invent a yin yoga pose and provides it no matter identify they need?
Just about.
In a way, once you’re working towards yin, you’re co-creating the pose. The instructor 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 possibly can sit with for some time? Or is there a pointy ache in your knee moderately than the meant 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.
Which means there isn’t a single alignment that’s right. There are various doable shapes, completely different orientations to gravity, and infinite little tweaks to make sure there’s a model of every pose for each physique. As a result of our our bodies are completely different from each other, once you prioritize discovering your good stretch, you’ll seemingly end up in a special form than the individual on the neighboring mat.
Yin yoga is a comparatively newer apply, one which has gained in reputation during the last couple a long time thanks largely to yin academics Paul and Suzee Grilley, who made a aware determination to not use Sanskrit names. They wished to distinguish yin postures from the normal yoga asana, or poses, that you simply expertise in a vinyasa class.
This determination was additionally made, partly, 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 wouldn’t have to sq. their hips and attempt to type 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 if you happen to sq. your hips or collapse off to the aspect. 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 calm down right into a meditative area.
This continued experimentation of working towards in accordance with our personal sensations inevitably results in the creation of recent shapes—and new names. Many yin academics, 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 regularly evolving lexicon of names is just proof of that. Resting Half Frog. Cobbler. Damaged Wing.
Practically twenty years into this apply, I’m nonetheless discovering this revelation by means of 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 following time you’re working towards a yin yoga pose and, in an effort to find simply the best sensation, you end up morphing from a Mermaid into one thing that strikes you as extra of a Aspect-Mendacity Sloth, know that you simply’re doing it precisely proper.
