For most of my yoga-enjoying life, I’ve been a vinyasa practitioner.
My first taste of yoga was my senior year of High School, when I elected to take most of my classes at a local community college. One gym credit per semester was a graduation requirement, so I decided to have fun with it. In the fall semester, I took a kayaking class. It was enjoyable but my inability to get to class at least 10 minutes early meant I was often left with a kayak intended to fit a large grown man, not a slight teenage girl.
In the spring semester, I opted for a yoga class. I thought it would be easy enough and nothing I had to take too seriously. I took it with a friend and we spent most of those 60 minutes in class twice a week giggling and flirting with a student from Puerto Rico and making fun of the teacher’s large bunions. (They. were. huge.) But over the course of those 15 weeks, something incredible began to happen. The yoga worked.
I have never been a flexible person. Birth limitation left me with a very small range of hip mobility and up until this point in my life, I had never been able to touch my toes. Sitting on a borrowed mat in a class with close to 30 other people, I was amazed the first time I reached for my feet and could grab them. My hips were tight and my legs inflexible but for the first time in my life, I had the range to touch my fingers to my toes.
We went through a few different yoga practices but mainly we stayed in vinyasa. What she called yin was holding hip-opening poses, something that does not work well for my body. I was put off of yin entirely.
Late in the semester, the teacher moved us on to meditation. This was not exciting to me – why would I want to sit in silence with only the runaway train of my thoughts? I made up my mind that I would not like it. She turned on a long meditation, a 20-minute body scan, flicked off the lights, and bade us lay down.
I couldn’t stand it. I was twitchy, I was uncomfortable, and I didn’t want to be there. But as the tape went on, I was able to tune in. The longer it went, the more into it I got, until the end when I found myself in a state of relaxation akin to the moments before you fall asleep. When the teacher turned it off, I was shockingly disappointed.
I was here and there with yoga for the rest of my college career and even into young adulthood. An hour of vinyasa was a challenging class and I hated the way I sweated and struggled.
After I moved in with my boyfriend in 2019, I found myself with hours of uninterrupted morning time. So, on a whim one day, I packed a bong and rolled out my mat. For the first time in my yoga-practicing career, I felt a flow state wash over me. It became a regular weekend occurrence to smoke and do yoga, sometimes flowing on my own and sometimes relying on Yoga with Adriene.
My then-boyfriend and I decided to give mediation another go to see if it really could help calm our dual anxieties. Waking Up with Sam Harris leaned a little too hard on the theory during the meditation, but it was enough to make me understand the power that stillness has.
During the pandemic, I, and millions of others, leaned heavily on Yoga with Adriene. It paired well with my other athletic endeavors and at 26 I found myself in the best shape of my life.
I fell off of yoga practice while living in the van. There wasn’t room to practice inside and I am easily dissuaded from outside yoga – the heat, the cold, the bugs, and the boring eyes of strangers all took me out of that flow state I desperately craved. I rolled out my mat a few times in Planet Fitness, but outside equipment is not allowed and I felt out of place as the only one doing yoga in a treadmill gym. After my husband left my mat in a random Planet Fitness somewhere on the East Coast, any attempts at doing yoga in the van were done.
In April of 2024, I set out on a cross-country trip, needing to get from New York to California in a matter of weeks. Along the way, I stopped in Omaha, Nebraska to visit a friend. This friend had recently completed her yoga teacher training and took up teaching at a local studio. I had to take a class with her.
The nature of my trip meant I was there for a very limited amount of time, during which she was only teaching one class: a Sunday morning yin class.
I was not enthused by this prospect. I don’t like yin; I protested to her (never mind that I had never actually tried a full class.) Still, Sunday morning found my husband and I in her class, lights low and every space filled. Clearly, my opinion on yin was not a popular one.
Even with my reservations about this type of flow, I trusted my friend to lead a class I would enjoy. What I didn’t expect what the indescribable wave of relaxation that came over me by the end of class, like someone had dipped my nervous system in a hot bath. I was as relaxed as the first time I did a meditation in my college yoga class, over a decade earlier.
When I moved to Taos, the first thing I did was get a library card. The second thing was to join a yoga studio. It had been many months since I had practiced with any regularity, and I had a dual desire to spend more time in my body and find a social outlet. The studio served both purposes.
My body hurt from months of sleeping at odd angles in the van and taking hikes without stretching before or after. Many mornings my back pain drove me out of bed even when I wanted to roll over and go back to sleep. The studio offered vinyasa classes which I enjoyed, but they also offered a weekly yin class. After my experience in Nebraska, I jumped at signing up.
Vinyasa yoga focuses on creating heat in the body; muscle alignment and strengthening. It is considered to reside in yang energy, highly masculine. In contrast, yin yoga resides in the yin side of the energy circle, highly feminine. Yin requires the opposite of vinyasa yoga – to find your comfortable edge, back off, and stay there. It asks you to give 40 – 50%, rather than 100%. Poses are held anywhere from 3 to 10 minutes and unlike my time in vinyasa classes, where I am constantly checking my watch, yin classes pass in the blink of an eye.
Had I not taken a class with my friend, I don’t know that I would have ventured into the world of yin yoga – and that just goes to show that opportunities to change your mind don’t always appear as such. In the nearly five months that I have lived in Taos, I have attended every yin class I am able too. The studio has added a second weekly yin as well as a vin/yin blend. Even on the weeks when I don’t feel up to a full vinyasa, I still attend the yin classes.
Yin yoga helps me show up in my body without expectations. It encourages me to not just accept support but to embrace it. To allow my needs for support to change by side, by pose, and from class to class. It allows me to sit in my bodily sensations and let them unfold, to sit in stillness and quiet within, and without.
My mother once told me that I mellowed out significantly after starting to smoke weed. If there are levels to being mellow, yin yoga has allowed me to reach the next level even without the cannabis plant. It is a weekly balm to my body and my system, taking me out of the world outside the four corners of my mat and placing me here and now, in this body. It helps me to accept the support I need without shame or comparison.
What a gift that is.
