Monday 14 November 2016

Melting Stretches and Yin Yoga

Melting stretches

I have just returned from a 4 day introduction to Yin Yoga.  Those of you who know me well, know my questioning nature, also my drive not just to read or be told about different movement modalities but to really understand them and to feel them in my own body.
Yin Yoga has been bouncing around on the edge of my understanding for several years, initially in my Yoga training, one of my fellow students introduced us to Yin Yoga, I remember walking around the garden of the house where we had our retreat, trying to understand TCM 5 element theory and not much else. However the seed was sown and so when Yin Yoga resurfaced at an International Fascia Congress in Washington, I sat up and listened. The speaker was Paul Grilley and he took the podium with Robert Schleip and explained about compression and tension in yoga poses. Because of his use of the words Compression and Tension, I thought he was talking about biotenegrity and I struggled to fit his explanation into the model of biotensegrity I held in my head. Today I think I was adding 2 and 2 and making 5, however I am still not 100% sure of that, and somewhere just out of reach, there is a connection but probably not the obvious one.
Yin yoga has also surfaced in the Fascial Fitness training relating to melting stretches.
Fascial stretches are part of the Fascial Fitness training, the principles of which are the activation of long chains and tensegrity structures, Pendiculation and variations in direction of stretch, and loading of the stretch using weights, resistance and bounces.
So when a Yin Yoga course based on the work of Paul Grilley popped up on Face book I didn’t press delete, I followed the link. The course was in London and offered the option to take the first weekend of a 200 hour Training as an introduction.

So what is Yin Yoga? My understanding was that it was mediation in a pose. Why is it so Fascial?

After 4 days of Yin yoga (2x 2hour classes per day), meditation, Traditional Chinese medicine (meridian theory) and psychology, including a good dose of energetic anatomy, classic anatomy, functional anatomy and a sparse sprinkling of fascial anatomy;  here is my understanding based upon my own experience.

Like all yoga it’s not all about the asana or poses, Yin seems to take more from the Chinese philosophy than the traditional yoga practice which is based on Indian.
Yin is the opposite of Yang, however they are co-dependant each having a little of the other in them, think of the symbol.





Yang is all action, masculine in nature, a yoga practice/exercise/movement practice or lifestyle, which focuses on exercising muscles and moving blood around the body is Yang.

Yin is calm and nurturing, feminine in nature, a yoga practice/exercise /movement practice, which focuses on the connective tissue.

The balance between the yin and yang is essential for wellbeing and this is what practicing Yin yoga along side yang forms of exercise aspires to bring.
The plastic nature of connective tissue, according to Yin Yoga, enjoys gentle pressures, applied for longer periods of time in order to grow strong.

These are my personal observations and may not be true for others however the classes for me where both extremely challenging, at times painful (in a good way), and wonderfully calming and releasing. You moved into the positions slowly, each position targeted different areas of the body which correspond to meridian theory, you are not in the pose until the target area to be ‘stressed’ by stretching has been found, this involved a lot of bolsters, blocks and experimenting with different foot/leg/body positions before the target area was found, some poses just didn’t work because of my unique pelvic shape/ femur head angle, tight tissues, past injury etc etc. The idea is to find a point of stress in the target area, which is not injurious or painful in a bad way and surf that point. This is a self practice, you have to trust your intuition your own awareness of how your body feels, everybody looked completely different, we were not adjusted or assisted in progressing the stretch just in finding the target area, the bolsters were not there to support as in restorative yoga, but to allow the practitioner to work around natural compression felt in their own body and to allow the muscles to turn off and a melting stretch of the connective tissue to occur. You then stay in that pose for anything between 1-5 or more minutes depending upon your experience. The time in the position was the challenge, I noticed how muscles I didn’t know I was contracting became obvious and so I released them and I sank deeper and deeper into the stretch. In order to feel the melt it helped to close your eyes and look inside your self, quiet and still. The hardest bit was yet to come but the reward was so wonderful. Coming out of the ‘melted position’ was far harder than going in, everything was done slowly and no-one was rushed. I often had to use my hands to move my legs out of the pose, there was a lot of groaning and grimacing. You then take a ‘rebound’ position, prone, supine or pose of a child where the most popular, sometimes taking a counter pose first, in the rebound time of around 2 minutes you could feel the connective tissues rebounding, slowly returning to their usual length, your body felt open and released, a cooling flow and such a peace and tranquility. The Yin yoga says that this is a restoring of the flow a Chi. My Fascial Fitness inner teacher probably would say it was also a rehydration of the tissue. What ever it was it was worth the wait.
After the class we went into mediation so easily.

Will I go back and continue the course?
This morning when I woke up I actually missed the early morning yin class. I also seemed very alert and ready to get going (unusual for me as I am not a morning person). I do ache in parts of my body, which I probably pushed to hard because I thought I could, after all I couldn’t let the youngsters in the room see that I was struggling could I! a lesson learned, it is my practice and no-one else was looking anyway.
The melting stretch was delicious and pleasurable, everything a fascial movement should be, I’m not sure I would be happy for a hyper mobile client to take a class and the usual contra-indicated population, pregnancy, joint replacements etc would need extra care but it is an experience I would recommend to my over stressed, anxious over exercised clients who need the repeated buzz of the Yang.

So now I know what a melting stretch really is, and I will do it again. Sadly I can only get to a couple more days of this course because of studio commitments.

The course was run by The Yoga People and well taught, bringing in experts in the various disciplines. The classes were amazing.
My fellow participants were lovely and very generous towards me. Thank you.




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