Everyday Sublime Podcast | Body, Mind + Beyond

In a Yin approach to meditation, you encounter the raw materials of your life: sensations of the body, perceptions, ideas, thoughts, views, and opinions. And in coming to know these elements more directly, you can shape and make of them what you will. How you act, think, speak, work, and rest are all of one process that you examine and develop in the workshop of your meditation practice. You are b...

What I'm about to suggest as a way of working with sleepiness will likely cause you to question my sanity. But, for me, and many that I've spoken to and worked with, allowing sleepiness to be, i.e. letting it go on, is the most effective strategy for working with it. And, in the context of this lesson, by doing so, you might find yourself inadvertently entering deep states of stillness by specific...

In contrast to more active and Yang ways of working with the hindrances, I've found it incredibly fruitful to adopt a more Yin approach. Rather than deploying any prescribed technique or strategy for dealing with them, I've found that bringing a relaxed, receptive, tolerant, and curious energy towards the hindrances is a really good first step. These qualities reframe the energy that my mind tends...

In this Yin approach to meditation that I'm describing, when you dial back any effort to try and control your mind, you're giving your mind space to explore things that it finds naturally engaging. For example, while relaxing and being receptive to your experience in meditation, you might find that you start to think about about a dynamic at work, or an unfinished project at home, or a disagreemen...

The peace in the heart of these still states provides a balm to stress and anxiety. There is a profound relief and well-being that often accompanies these states. And frequently, when you experience them, there is a blooming of faith that something significant and important is developing in your meditation practice. And one of the truly wonderful aspects of a Yin approach to meditation is that int...

By committing to a fixed time, you will inevitably go through phases of calm, agitation, boredom, restlessness; periods of wondering when it will end, and possibly periods of time of not wanting it to end. And in sitting through all these experiences -- riding these internal waves -- you will start to get to know your inner world better.

When your mind is given permission to be receptive to the total spectrum of experience and to relax within that process -- and to not try and push unpleasant things away -- one of the things that relaxes is the resistance to conflict. I'm sure you've heard the old aphorism: "That which you resist, persists?" Well, it's true in meditation, too. If you resist conflict, it tends to just push back and...

The general "mental posture" within a Yin approach to meditation is for your mind to be receptive and open to the full range of your inner experience. But with such an open-ended approach, it's not uncommon for challenging emotions and themes to arise within your practice. I suggest handling these strong mental/emotional energies in the same manner that you might negotiate strong sensation in the...

In a Yin approach to meditation, the main emphasis is to develop a relaxed and receptive attitude towards the experiences you have while meditating - you're not trying to control or overly manage those experiences; you're developing gentleness and tolerance to yourself and the variety of experiences you have while meditating.

When we look at different mental qualities, Yin qualities of mind tend to include traits like receptivity, allowance, yielding, tolerance, quiescence, reflection, passivity, or non-manipulation. Yang qualities of mind tend to involve traits like doing, manipulating, directing, improving, achieving, controlling, or becoming. From a Chinese perspective, both Yin and Yang qualities are essential. And...

Simply put, meditation is mental training, and a way to know yourself better. Meditation develops certain qualities of your mind. For thousands of years, this mental training was practiced within spiritual and religious communities, often requiring a fair amount of faith, belief, and superstition on behalf of the student. But now, there is a renaissance underway, ushering in new ways of practicing...

I often get the sense that when students come to a Yin Yoga class they want to feel good throughout the class, start to finish, particularly when it's a class that seems on the surface to be "gentle" and "quiet" and "meditative". And yet, that is not the average newcomer's experience. At some point during the second or third pose of the sequence, newcomers often evince a grimace of distaste and co...

All too frequently, someone says to me: "I love how Yin Yoga makes me feel... BUT, I couldn't just do Yin Yoga." Based on their expression as they say this, I can only assume they think they've caught me in some kind of gotcha moment, where they're exposing a blind spot in my understanding of YinYoga. And much to their surprise, I respond, "Of course, you wouldn't ONLY practice Yin Yoga. I would n...

When it is time to come out of a Yin Posture, you may feel a pronounced disinclination to move quickly. Remember: the tissues in the area that you have targeted will be temporarily weakened as a result of the stresses placed upon them during the hold. As such, these targeted areas tend to feel delicate, fragile, vulnerable, and tender. So, because of these kinds of sensations, it's a good idea to...

The third principle of Yin Yoga is to stay still for relatively longer periods of time than you would in an active style of yoga practice, such as Ashtanga or Vinyasa Yoga. The question of how long you should hold the posture often surfaces. By now, you may be anticipating my answer. How long you should stay in a posture depends on a few factors: namely, the tolerance level and strength of the tis...

The second aspect of executing a Yin Yoga posture is to relax the muscles in the area that you are targeting. Confusion tends to arise when students hear this instruction to "relax the muscles." There is a tendency to take this as a global mandate that in Yin Yoga poses ALL muscles everywhere MUST relax, but this is going too far. In practice, you endeavor to relax the muscles primarily in the tar...

In Yin Yoga, and increasingly in other styles too, there is an emphasis placed on understanding how your body is uniquely influenced by the pose and then from that, making wiser choices about how to align yourself within the pose. How you feel and adapt to what you're feeling are important elements of Playing Your Edge in Yin Yoga poses.

Yin Yoga is an approach to yoga that is meant to be a complementary style of practice to more active styles of postural yoga. The intentions of Yin Yoga are to stimulate, strengthen, and revive tissues of the body that are not emphasized to the same degree as in active styles of yoga, hence its complementary nature.

This podcast is intended to be a reflection on and for practice. For many years, I've signed off my monthly newsletter with the phrase, "From my practice to yours." What this attempts to convey is that first and foremost, I'm a practitioner - a Yin yogi, an acupuncturist, a meditator. As a practitioner, I'm committed to a process of learning, refining, unlearning, integrating, and developing. I ho...