I have started a training in Yin Yoga, after one in Vinyasa. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, let me give a brief and simplistic explanation that will anger the advocates of complexity (including myself): Vinyasa is centered around a “flowy”, dynamic practice, while Yin is based on holding poses for longer. Looking from the outside you’ll find people standing, balancing or moving a lot more in the former, while you’ll often see them sitting, folding or lying down in Yin classes. “Well, actually…” “Yes, I know it’s a simplification. That’s what the disclaimer was for” (me responding to me nit-picking).
There’s a very specific way in which this practice is challenging. Discipline and surrendering are so closely intertwined that it’s hard to tell whether you’re resisting or letting go. And if there’s something that Yin teaches you is exactly this: things contain their opposite and much more. There’s no Yin without Yang. Relaxing, sinking, leaning are all things we have to earn.
Letting go is actually a lot of work.
In Yin you’re not asked to “push through” like they might instruct you in a pilates class. It’s not that kind of holding. You usually hold poses that in other yoga classes constitute the much desired end of a cycle, or some momentary relief: forward folds, child’s poses, twists. This way Yin tricks your brain into thinking this will be “chill hour”, only to realize how fast your mind is going, and how hard it is to tell it to chill. You are gently invited to find space in confinement, to make stillness a resource, a window of clarity and mindful suspension.
In Yin, to hold means to stay. To tolerate. Learning to sustain a certain amount of frustration and restlessness is at the core of it, so when any of these uncomfortable feelings arise, they are not expelled with the help of energetic movements, but sustained with big breaths.
Sounds terrible, doesn’t it? It sure does to me.
If you’d ask me what resembles torture the most amongst relatively non torturing things, it would be this: to stay still and hold that stillness. Not just that, to hold that stillness without grinding your teeth or squeezing the air with your fists.
Soft discipline.
Gentle intensity.
A paradox.
Inhabiting a space where nothing happens, so everything can happen.
Impulsive people like me, when they go to therapy, learn to suspend their actions in favor of reflection. For some time, they lose spontaneity, and are confronted with a much less raw experience. Isn’t it a sign of authenticity to transform emotions and thoughts into the immediacy of visible facts? How come healing means withholding? Well, actually…
Healing means moving. From somewhere stuck and rotten, to somewhere new. We can be stuck by keeping everything in, but we can also be stuck in throwing everything out, as an uncontrolled reflex. Our safest ways are often either inside our outside of our skin. That’s why holding for a second longer can be so groundbreaking: during that automation, it stops that thought exactly where it hurts more, on our skin. On its way out or in.
Hold that thought. Before it enters, before it exits. Ask it where it comes from and where it wants to go. Stay with it one more breath. Change perspective. On your next breath, it might have changed so much that you don’t want to get rid of it anymore.
So? Healing is moving. Healing is staying.
When opposites collaborate rather than clashing, that’s healing.
On our healing paths we learn the patience to hold thoughts, positions, time.
We learn that urgency has little truth, and the only thing not worth holding is our breath.
Empatherapy 