MAY 2007
Recently Sarah Powers and I spoke about many things Yin.
Sarah Powers has been teaching yoga since 1987. She makes her home in
Marin, California, but travels internationally offering retreats and workshops
in her intelligent and compassionate blend of yin and a flow style of
yoga, transpersonal psychology, and Buddhist Mindfulness. Her training
and influences include Dzogchen Buddhism, Vipassana, Ashtanga, Viniyoga,
and Iyengar teachings.
Susan: Since I began doing yin I’ve been doing it four
or five days a week, and I always “yin” before I teach or
practice. I had been experiencing constant injury at the origin of the
hamstrings and also origin of adductor muscles, and that’s just
a thing of the past. It’s easy for me to be passionately committed
to teaching and encouraging others in yin because, even at a purely bio-mechanical
level, the practice has been so effective for me.
Sarah: That’s great to hear. Every time I come out of a day’s
practice I feel so much renewed enthusiasm to share it, even years later.
It’s made a big difference for me also.
Susan: Students always ask me, “How am I going to find
time to do this?”
Sarah: I think we can look at our lives and see what we really care
about by how we spend our time. If someone is beginning to value the quality
of how they are living their moments, then giving themselves ten or fifteen
minutes to drop the outward going activity of their mind and do some yin
yoga, (feeling into the body without an agenda), then they will start
to find that there is so much more emotional space in their life. It won’t
feel so cramped inside. So I think it actually gives people more time,
rather than taking away.
Susan: You know, one thing I enjoy in the process of teaching
yin is its almost instant efficacy. You don’t have to tell people
what it’s going to do!
Sarah: True. They get to directly experience it. It’s also the
perfect opportunity to allow them to experience how softening their mental
state allows the energy body to redistribute in a much more natural and
harmonious way. And this will affect how they experience their active
yoga postures as well.
Susan: Would you like to say more about that, the effect on
the energy body?
Sarah: Well, the connective tissues that we are taxing when doing long
held poses (or you could say while we are loading the ligaments with some
pressure and pulling) houses the unseen pathways that our vital energy
flows through. Indian yogis call these energy highways Nadis, Chinese
yogis call them Meridians. Our energy body (the sum total of all these
energy pathways) tends to densify, calcify, or stagnate when we don’t
move our bodies outside of our more habitual ranges of motion. Obviously
this is why we do yoga postures. But coming into a pose in a consciously
slow yin way and staying for many minutes at a time helps us go into deeper
corridors within our natural ranges of motion in the joints of the hips
and lower back, where the meridian chi can become most deficient.
Susan: Yes. There's a loss of our natural self-knowing motion
that results not only in health deforming compression but a loss of self-
awareness. In yin we don't demand extremes, we basically gradually remember
ourselves.
Sarah: Lovely way to say it. And for this reason it is safe. We’re
not going outside our natural ranges of motion, we’re just using
the full extent of our ranges of motion. It is a way of stimulating the
vitality and motility of the energy body coursing through those tissues.
An effective way to stimulate the meridian system is to push on or pull
the connective tissue, which is what shiatsu and acupressure are based
on.
Susan: Right. Plus, as I’m often telling students, this
is a really great way to stimulate the retention of calcium. Kripalu guests
who are my age often have osteoporosis or osteopinia on their minds and
I try to foster an understanding of the natural balance of the moving
body, that health isn’t necessarily a pharmaceutical or medical
approach, it’s just about the way you live in your body.
Sarah: That’s a good point. When we have a deeper understanding
of what we’re doing beyond just feeling discomfort or trying to
be patient, there’s more motivation to sink into it. That’s
why there are different styles of classes. Some just help us stay committed
to practicing, while others are geared toward helping people have more
intelligence about what is going on inside themselves while they are in
the poses. Understanding how the meridian system flows within us gives
us a deeper understanding than simply knowing the Western anatomical functions
of the organ system. Having some understanding of Chinese Medicine connects
us with how the organs are related to this unseen energy field, and how
our yoga poses affect these pathways.
For example you have two kidneys but you also have kidney meridians;
there’s kidney chi and then there’s meridian chi. And they
influence each other. It’s along the meridian channels where the
energy gets more disrupted, especially where bone comes together with
bone, in joint sites, so that’s what is being stimulated by certain
Yin postures.
On an energetic level, in the ancient Chinese medical system, the kidneys
are in charge of the health of our bones. It’s the kidney “juice”
that stimulates the cellular production in the bone marrow, the white
and red blood cells. White blood cells are essential for immunity, and
red blood cells carry oxygen. So it is the dynamic vitality of the kidney
chi that’s in charge of not only our spinal health, but our immunity
and overall cellular vitality as well.
I often say that a kidney or liver sequence of Yin poses is like a needle
– less acupuncture session.
As you learn more about the kidney, the liver, or the spleen chi, and
how the integrity of the body and mind is dependant on their equilibrium,
the more effortless it becomes to get up and practice.
There’s also a whole psychosomatic level to balancing the energy
body that I find really fascinating. Strong and flowing Prana is vitally
important because this directly affects the way we feel and the way we
think. It has a direct influence on our perception of what is important
in our world.
Susan: For me yin is also a beautiful practice that returns
us to knowing ourselves as the bodes we are, a way of curing the endless
polarization of mind and body metaphors. It helps ground students in an
awareness that feeling of any sort - whether it's physical sensation or
something we deem emotional - is feeling that is done by structure. Without
being a body, we couldn't feel anything. So often I hear people speak
about themselves as though they were a cloud floating around near their
muscles and bones. I feel all practices are a way of getting through this
disembodiment, of exploring and ultimately disabusing ourselves of the
notion of there's me, and then there's some "part of me," and
then oh yeah, here's my body, too. You know, we can get free of dissociation.
Sarah: That’s a very good point. Sometimes we don’t know
why we feel better, we just feel better. We have little awareness of the
subtlety of feeling, we just want to feel good, and like it when we do,
hate it when we don’t. During a Yin sequence we can strengthen our
ability to impartially attend to a wider array of sensations and feelings,
developing this psychologically based skill of widening our sphere of
acceptable feelings.
When difficult feelings arise during the practice, we have the time
to work with them more precisely. We can bring that which we have split
off from into the light of attention. We can even personify a tight knot
of tension so that we can relate to it more directly. In this way, tension
is temporarily segregated from the rest of our experience and offered
our full acceptance and investigation. Often buried unmet needs are then
allowed to surface and be honored. The Yin poses offer an atmosphere of
calm abidance that can support this kind of psychodynamic work.
Susan: That’s lovely.
Sarah: If we are aware, we can become conscious of what’s going
on within us during the process of living. Usually we just say, “well
this feels awful or that felt great so I’ll do this again tomorrow,
and not that. “ We are often blindly ruled by hope and fear. We
don’t really know what’s going on in our inner life. I really
enjoy sharing tools that help people become more awake to themselves,
body and mind.
I’ll give you an example. Let’s say someone is in a passive
back bend like Seal. Seal stimulates the connective tissues called the
longitudinal ligaments along the spine. The kidney meridian flows through
the bones and ligaments in the lower back. Kidney imbalances are related
to fear.
During the pose I might suggest you attend to any fear that arises while
you are here. While feeling into the compression in the lumbar, a feeling
of being stuck, not only in your back, but in some other region of your
life, your relationship with your partner for example. Staying in the
pose while being with this feeling non-judgmentally, you may discover
a fear you have been avoiding such as a feeling that your partner can
not really meet you emotionally in the way you need. This insight might
arise out of inquiring into what this back pain would say if it could
speak. You might even let the pain be seen in front of you so you can
relate to it more clearly by personifying it. As you continue to breath
into your spine, allowing sensations and feelings room to breath as well,
you literally inhabit yourself more fully. Without rushing to create ‘solutions’
we have time in a yin pose to explore various levels of our experience.
This in itself is extremely liberating.
Susan: Amazing. Again, it helps us all understand we're not
operating somewhere out in space, we're embodied, and there is natural
health, natural sanity, and really, natural joy in that.
Sarah: Yes. The layers. Blending the physical with the emotional, and
transpersonal levels really expands what the possibilities are within
a yoga practice.
Susan: I’ve been thinking and reading a lot lately about
cellular processes. I believe that is where we can help people release
the tension that causes illness.
Sarah: Ah. When you think of cells as continually being regenerated
in the bone marrow, and if it’s the kidney chi that is in charge
of the health and production of the bone marrow, this kind of cellular
makeover that’s going on constantly can be enhanced by the way you
practice yoga on a regular basis.
I have found with Yin Yoga that there is both a preventative aspect
to it, by nourishing our individual constitutional needs, and there’s
a regenerative quality it engenders, when we’ve already gone down
the road of deficiency and depletion .
Susan: And I think this is the critical health level, fundamentally.
Sarah: Yes. It’s a way of stimulating the restorative process
within us. Nourishing the Meridian system before our bodies rigidify or
become a mass of cells congealed in some distortion is the responsibility
of each of us. We have to practice in a consistent and balanced way if
we want to affect a more quantum level of health. And even as the body
grows old or gets sick we need to remember that true well being is a state
of mind.
Susan: Yeah. That’s it.
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