Root Chakra Yin Yoga

Hello everyone, welcome to Root Chakra Yin Yoga. Today's practice is really awesome and it's accessible for most people. We're going to be on the ground the whole time, grounding into the earth. That's the whole ideology of the root chakra is grounding. And, um, if you have a bolster. This is my favorite one. I love it. There is a link in the description. You can grab it. It's not expensive. You can grab it on Amazon, and I love it. If you don't have a bolster and you don't want to invest in one, you could also use some pillows. I have these big pillows I got at TJ Maxx, and they do the same thing. Like, they're the same. It's the same. Um, but you can also just use pillows off your bed. It really doesn't— you don't have to have fancy stuff to do this. Uh, I have a Mexican blanket that I like to sit on. You do not need to have a Mexican blanket. Maybe you didn't go to Mexico like I did and get that blanket. You can just use a regular old toss blanket. And just fold it up so that you can use it to sit on. It truly is not about the props. If you want to treat yourself to a nice bolster, please do, because they're awesome. Okay, my name is Angelica. I've been teaching yoga for 37 years, and I've been practicing— no, it's the other way around. I have been practicing yoga for 37 years, and I've been teaching yoga for 17 years. I host online yoga teacher training and yoga intensives They are Yoga Alliance approved, and once you get certified, you can teach anywhere in the world. I have a 200-hour, 300-hour, and a 500-hour, and I do them one-on-one, so it's just me and you in the training. Get new content released every week, and at the end of the week, we meet and go over your practicums and your assignments and discuss what your hopes and dreams are and how we can make that happen. And so people who graduate from my trainings are super successful and they do really well in becoming yoga teachers. All right, let's get to the root chakra yin class. You might hear a little bit of sound. It is, um, snow hailing today. It's May 24th here in Colorado and it's snow hailing. Now I'm from Las Vegas, Nevada. My husband got a job here in Colorado for the summer, so that's why we're here. But I'm used to 110 degrees, so this is different, but it's fun. Honestly, like, it's kind of fun. Before we get started, if you want to turn on some music, I'm not going to play music in the background of this video because choose your own music is so much more fun. Like, I don't know what you like, and honestly, for YouTube, you have to pick like royalty-free music, or you have to pay for royalty, and none of the music is really that good. So turn on your iTunes and let's get jamming with some cool, awesome yin yoga for the first chakra. The first thing we want to do is start with the meditation because— a little dog hair there— because a meditation is going to bring us into the space. So just start to breathe in and out through the nose, and maybe you want to sit on your blanket to give you a little bit of elevation. And for me, this is my easy seated pose. I like to just sit this way. Maybe for you it's your legs extended, maybe it's just having your legs kind of together this way. Whatever feels like a nice easy seated pose for you works for me. The whole point is for it to be easy and feel good. All right, some people like to sit like up against the couch too, that's really nice. Taking a deep inhale and an exhale out the nose. Good. Breathe in through the nose and breathe out through the nose. As we continue our practice today, just remember to breathe in and out through the nose. The breathing in and out through the nose is what is going to calm our nervous system and allow us to move away from flight or fright— fight or flight response. I'm just going to go ahead and turn off my, my phone so it doesn't interrupt us.

Good.

Continuing to breathe in and out through the nose. May your whole body start to come into awareness, into this present practice, into this beautiful moment that we're having right now. Everything else no longer exists. The only thing that matters is this moment right now. So for the next 45 minutes, you're going to dedicate dedicate this time just to you. You're going to take this time to focus on the cultivation of your own needs, wants, and desires, of the things that help you feel grounded so that you can show up for other people. You see, our first chakra, the root chakra, it is about stability, safety, home, finances. And so it's the way in which we interact with the other people in our lives. So if you find that you need to build and cultivate that first chakra, which honestly we all do, then you'll want to stay for this whole practice because it will only help you feel more grounded. Again, breathing in and out through the nose. Any sounds around you, just let them become a part of your meditation today. Let them become a part of your practice. Any thoughts that come into your mind, we want to acknowledge them and release them. So our yoga practice is not about getting rid of thoughts, it's about not reacting to thoughts. So we're not reacting to the thoughts that come into our mind. Instead, we're saying, okay, I'm gonna think about you in 43 or 42 minutes. Right now I'm thinking about me. That's the first step in the first chakra.

I am here.

The color of the first chakra is red. It's where we say and state our existence. And when we feel that we have a strong focus on the breath, we feel that we have moved into a strong breath work, we can move into our first posture. So go ahead and just open your eyes nice and gentle. Good, you're looking great. I'm excited for you. I like to drink hot tea during my practice. I find it very relaxing for myself, and so I have my hot tea. It's Caramel Almond.

Mmm. Mm, it really is hot.

I'm gonna set it on the table here.

Okay, let that cool off.

All right, for our first grounding posture today in yin yoga, we're going to go ahead and just extend our legs out. If you want to continue to sit on a blanket to just elevate you a little bit, that sometimes helps people to fold forward. This posture is called Caterpillar.

So our—

all of our legs are grounding into the earth, all the back side of our legs, and our bum is grounding into the earth. And we'll probably feel a little bit of a stretch in our low back, but that is yet to be determined what we each individually feel. Now grab your pillows or your bolster, whatever feels good to you. It might be good to start with the bolster upward like this I also like taking a couple of pillows and stuffing them into a pillowcase, and that makes it like really like one pillowcase, two pillows, makes it really strong. You're going to go ahead and inhale, lengthen through the spine, and then just exhale, folding forward into the Caterpillar Pose.

Now one thing to think about is that in Yin Yoga, we call all of the poses a little bit different names than what we do in regular yoga. So This would be called Paschimottanasana in our regular yoga practice. That's Intense Western Stretch. It is a forward fold. We call it Intense Western Stretch because back in the day, back in the day when yoga was first created, yogis would salute the sun by doing sun salutations, and then they would do this forward fold as part of their practice, and the back of their body would be facing west, and it would create an intense western stretch. And so that's why they call it Paschimottanasana. But in yin yoga, we're doing this a little bit differently. We're not going to be working on muscles, we're going to be working on connective tissues. So we're working on ligaments We're working on joints, we're working on bones, and we're working on fascia. Remembering your breath, breathing in and out through the nose. So yin yoga wants to always be done in a cold room, and that's how we can get into those connective tissues. We want to do our yin practice when our bodies are more cold, which is great for me because it's 57 degrees right now here in Colorado with the snow coming down, and that's 57 degrees inside of my camper. And we want the movement in yin to always be slow, so we're always moving in a slow way. Just breathing in and out through the nose. I'll let you have some time here in this pose. We like to hold for time in yin. So we'll be holding all of our poses for a pretty long time. The thing about yin yoga is that it's teaching us how to be with our mind. With this, and the mind, like, the mind practice is the tantamount practice of, of yoga in general. See, there's 8 limbs of yoga, and most Westerners, we're only doing one of the 8 limbs, and that's asana, physical practice. Now, it's actually the third limb. It's pretty far down on the steps of yoga. The eighth step is called samadhi, or enlightenment, and there are multiple levels of that that we can actually achieve in our lifetimes, and then we ultimately become a god of our own unique divine understanding. Just continuing to breathe in and out through the nose here. If it feels good to stay in this position with your bolster this way, you most certainly can, or your pillows.

If you want to move a little bit deeper because it makes sense for you now, you can move around and adjust and just come a little bit further down into the fold, taking a moment here to recognize where you're feeling the stress in the body. Yin yoga wants us to create a little bit of stress in our body, and stress is good for the body. It's good for us to experience small amounts of stress. If you at any time during your practice today feel pain, I want you to back off of that pain because pain is not what we're trying to achieve. We're just achieving mild stress. I can't be there with you, so I really can't be responsible for your body. You've got to be responsible for your own body. You've got to know and understand your own body. And remember, here we're grounding into the earth right now, really feeling that energetically pulling us towards the planet on the backs of the legs, the firmness of feeling solid. Oftentimes we don't feel solid in our life. Oftentimes we feel like our lives are a little bit chaotic. And, you know, honestly, over the last few years, it feels like everything is completely changed in the world. And the things that, you know, just having— it's such a relief to have regular old problems with your family and not just problems with the world, right? And it doesn't even matter, like, there are really no sides with that. It's just, it's just kind of one of those things where everything has changed for all of us, and there's no going back from that. So we have to create a stronger sense of internal grounding, and that comes from the first chakra. From here, we're going to go ahead and just really very gently and slowly roll up. Wow, that's really intense sounding outside. And just put your bolster to the side. For a— to do a posture to counteract the pose we just did, let's do some windshield wipers, just leaning back onto your hands.

Sometimes the words just get away from you. I read if you tap on your third eye, it'll come back.

Contraindicating pose. Just going back and forth, making windshield wipers with your knees, and then we'll move into our next posture. So for our next posture that we're going to ground through the earth, we're going to do a butterfly pose. That's going to open us up at the knees and bring this— the soles of the feet together. So So creating a nice grounding area on the soles of the feet. Whatever level of forward fold you want to do in this pose is totally good. So if you want to just kind of lengthen and then fold into it without a bolster or any kind of prop, that's okay. If you want to bring a bolster in or a pillows, you most certainly can do that. Inhale lengthening and exhale folding. Now there are 3 tenets of Yin Yoga.

The first is to bring ourselves into a place of stress on the pose, so just where you start to feel it. That's how far you want to fold down, where you begin to feel the pose. And once you feel that— and that's going to be a little bit individual for all of us— but once you feel that, then you want to try and find a space of stillness. Once we find that stillness, then we want to hold for time. So we're just holding here, breathing in and out through the nose. One of the ways that the first chakra can manifest itself in our bodies when it's out of balance is in either being somewhat overweight or being somewhat underweight. If we find that we're in an underweight situation, then it's this lack of the first chakra. It's this ideology within our bodies that there's not enough of things, there's not enough for us. And when we find ourselves where we're a little bit on the overweight side, it's that same ideology that there's not enough, that we have to hoard, that we have to keep more. That we have to protect ourselves and our body because there's not enough abundance. So when we begin to work with balancing the first chakra, when we find that we're moving into this space of becoming more balanced, that's when our eating habits also become more balanced. You see, all of our eating issues are really emotional issues. Anytime that we're eating when we're not hungry, or we're eating when we are hungry, is because of— or we're eating— I'm sorry, we're, we're not eating when we're hungry, it's because of an emotional thing. So our connection to food is very emotional, and it doesn't make sense to to say like, oh, I'm just gonna restrict myself, or I'm not gonna eat, or I'm gonna eat more, or whatever it is that we're working on this week, flavor of the week as far as diet goes. What we really want to do is come to this space where we're finding peace within the poses and within our life and peace within our bodies, and that will naturally allow us to start to feel more balanced. And so we'll naturally find that we will come to a healthy body weight, and that's all associated with the first chakra. So it's this association with finding that peace and calm and finding balance and understanding that there is enough for you. The world is an abundant place, and looking at the world as a place of abundance. If you want to come deeper into this pose, you could move deeper into it now. If you don't, please don't feel like you have to. If you want to come a little bit further out of the pose, if it's too much, do that. You see, it's not in our practice— our yoga practice is not like the life competition that we've been taught. We've been taught that we must always go deeper. We've been taught that we must always go further. We've been that we must always do more, and that's not yoga. That's not what yoga is teaching us. Gotta get a drink really quick. I know that's fiddling. I came out, came out of the pose. You know, that's what I needed right now was a little drink. With my throat.

My throat was getting dry.

I'm sorry that I'm like gasping for air all the time. We are at 9,000 feet of altitude, and so I feel like I'm always just like breathing. I'm just breathing.

Go ahead and just slowly— nice and slow, that feels really good— just coming up out of the pose. And we'll take our bolster. We're going to counteract that pose that we just did. You could do some windshield wipers. Coming onto your palms and letting the knees go back and forth.

Or you could extend the legs out and maybe bump the knees up and down.

There goes my little oven. If you want to do that, any kind of move that feels organic to you, that's how you want to counter the posture that we were just in. We don't— I don't know what is what you want and what's working for you. And so it's important that you do the right thing for your own body.

Okay, sip your tea if you have it. Put that up to the side.

This is one of my favorite yoga poses in yin. We're going to do a twist. So if you had a blanket, you want to just take it out of the way. You're going to sit on to one side. So I'm just sitting on to my right side. You're going to take your right hand behind you and just sit up nice and straight. What I don't want to see is tilting over to the side. I want you to stay nice and straight. And then bring your left hand onto your right knee. We'll lengthen and just kind of twist behind you. Nice easy twist. I want you to come to a space that you can maintain here. It's really important that you be able to maintain this posture. So if it feels uncomfortable to you, say maybe like right now you're feeling a little tweaking in the knee and you want to just extend that out, please do that. Please do what feels good to your body. Not what I'm telling you to do. See, the point is that the whole practice in this whole entire exercise of grounding and self-empowerment is that you feel self-empowered, that you feel like, hey, Angelica's telling me to do this, but my body wants to do this, then I'm gonna do that. As long as you're within the realm of what makes your body feel safe That's what you want to do. I want you to feel empowered. I want you to feel like what you're doing makes you feel better and that you feel great because of what you're doing. We'll just hold here for time, breathing in and out through the nose. If any thoughts try to come into your practice and intrude on our time together, just acknowledge them and release them. Let them go. We'll go ahead and slowly turn our head to the middle and then bring your hand out. Go ahead and just kind of counter twist the other way. Come up onto your hands and knees and slide the feet over so that you're just sitting on to the other side. Now this is called the Deer Pose. It's actually not in regular yoga, it's just in yin yoga. Lengthening your spine. Oh my gosh, that feels really good for me. I don't know how that feels for you. But twisting the other way. Now, the reason why we twist on the right side first and then we twist on the left side is for digestion. So our intestines, they move— I'm just straightening up my spine here, so if you find that you were leaning a little bit too, maybe you want to straighten your spine. So our intestines, it moves through the right side of the body and then through the left side. In the large intestine. And so that's why we twist right side first and then left side. Otherwise you might find yourself toot toot releasing a little bit and toot toot releasing a little bit in class, making a toot toot. And I mean, I guess you're by your house by yourself. If you want to make some toots, please toot away. Toot as much as you need. But we can feel this sensation of just grounding into the earth right now. We're just grounding on our left side and lengthening our spine and just feeling strong and just letting your chest rise. You know, Tony Robbins, um, when I took the, um, Unleash the Power Within, he talks about the 2 inches in your sternum and just lifting them And if that resonates with you, just lift your sternum there and feel how much more empowered you feel when you sit up straight. Like, just literally sitting up straight, standing up straight, and owning your space helps you to feel strong in the root chakra. It helps you to feel strong in your space. You're doing a really great job. I'm so glad that you're here. Thank you for staying this long, and I thank you for yourself. That thank you is really like you saying thank you, me. Thank you for doing this practice. You know, I didn't give up on myself. I didn't let my low attention span keep me in the TikTok world. I'm here longer. I've been thinking a lot lately about you know, different things that I've done over the years to promote my online yoga teacher training, to connect with people through the practice of yoga. And I find that I really love YouTube because we can be together longer and because we can really get to know each other. And I feel like there's a more genuine connection that happens here. Again, this is first chakra work, right? Empowering yourself. And the thing is that Harvard did this study on happiness, and it was like a 75-year study where they went and just watched people's lives their whole lives. And what they found was that when we do more of what makes us happy and less of what doesn't, we are happier. I know it's so profound, what a profound thought, but really, like, I always say this, that I teach yoga to help people find happiness, but really, like, yoga is just the conduit. The goal is happiness. It has nothing to do with the poses. It just has to do with finding feeling good in our lives. And that's a really first chakra empowering sensation. I'm starting to slide back. If you're starting to slide back, just lift up. I found that my hand was a little bit— there was a little bit of sensation in my hand there. Let's go ahead and just twist nice and slow to the other side.

Feels really good. See where we're at.

Okay, we're going to take our bolster now, and if you don't have a bolster, you can most certainly use pillows. Here, and we're going to come onto them with our forearms and then just walk the legs back and let the belly kind of hang in the middle. I'm going to turn a little bit askew here because my freezer is in the way. Well, what we're doing here is now we're grounding that front body into the earth and feeling that sensation of grounding with the front body. So breathing deep here, in and out through the nose. Oftentimes when we're feeling out of balance, it's hard for us to physically balance, and so that really comes back to the mind. You see, everything about the yoga practice is a mind practice. Take a moment here to see what you're feeling, where you're feeling the sensation, and adjust if you need to. Maybe extend those 2 inches in the sternum. But what we find when we're practicing yoga is that this, this body is not really who we are. Who we are is inside. And I saw this like really cool thing the other day, and I I can't remember where it was, but I, I mean, whatever. I don't— I'm certainly not trying to offend anyone, and whatever your religion is, like, I respect that. I think that we all come to our own decision on spirituality, but whatever your ideology is, there is typically this, like, idea of the, the Trinity, like the three And somebody said that like the Trinity is actually in our body. It's our, our body, our mind, and our soul. Like our body, our mind, and our spirit is the Holy Trinity. No, I'm not super Christian, but I grew up Christian. I grew up Catholic. And that just really resonated with me that like everything that God creates, God, Spirit, Universe creates for itself, it creates inside of us because we are God, because we are that connection to spirit. And I know, like, now we're moving into something else, but it just got me to think about, you know, that connection that we want to make with all the three parts of our body— with our mind, our body, and our spirit, right? All the three parts of, like, shouldn't say body, of our existence, this mind, body, spirit connection of existing as a human being on this planet during this lifetime. And when we find that connection, it helps us to feel more grounded. It helps us to feel more secure in ourselves. And when we feel that, we can then begin to manifest abundance financially, manifest abundance in our relationships, Like, I couldn't be with my partner until I had learned how to be a good partner. I couldn't have a boyfriend or a husband or someone in my life until I learned how to be those things, until I learned how to be what it was that I was trying to create. So when we are trying to create something for grounding, for our first chakra, for our connection to stability in our life. What we need to realize is that it's already within us, it's already predetermined. We need to pull that out by believing that it can happen. So for me, I write it all down, what I'm manifesting, because that's where manifestation starts, right? It starts there in the first chakra. It also starts up in the 7th chakra and it moves through the current of liberation and starts to interact with the other different chakras. So we've got to get that first chakra strong and powerful. Adjust if you need, just keep it nice and lengthened. We've got to keep that first chakra in check, strong and powerful, if we want to continue on with having that manifesting in abundance happen in our life. And I think that's one of the beautiful things about yoga, and I think that's one of the beautiful things about movement, and it's one of the beautiful things about just connecting with your own body and your own self. Let's go ahead and just slowly move the bolster our pillows out of the way. You're going to let your head fall to one side, use your hands as a pillow, and then bend your knee and just bring that knee up towards the elbow.

Well, I'm doing the left side because that's where my microphone is, so that way you can continue to hear me while I'm doing this side.

We're just opening up the hip here and really just letting ourselves melt into the ground.

Just connecting with that Mother Earth energy, bringing it back to the breath, in and out through the nose. Let's go ahead and just switch to the other side. Turn your head to the other side and let your opposite knee come up towards your opposite elbow. We're just going to breathe in here.

Nice opening of the hips, allowing our body to ground down through the earth, just letting the vibration of the planet come up into our body, letting ourselves melt with that vibration. Mm, and really slowly. You can either roll onto your back and we'll come into shavasana, or if you want to, you can come into an easy seated pose again for our final meditation together. So if you're lying on your back, let your feet come as wide as your mat. Let your arms come to your sides and your palms either facing up to receive energy, or facing down to keep energy inside. Lengthen through your spine, let the shoulders roll open. If you're sitting here with me, instead of doing Shavasana for your final pose, you're doing a meditation, just come into the easy seated pose that works best for you. Taking a deep inhale through the nose and a deep exhale out the nose. And I want you to feel from the base of your spine a red light starting to form, and that red light becomes a spinning disc. In the middle of the disc is a nice strong mound of earth and it's spinning out in a nice rhythmic fashion. That is your first chakra, the Muladhara chakra. That's what it's called, and it's giving you this over-empowering feeling of deep-rootedness, this strength inside of you that's washing through your whole body as the color of red just expands throughout all of you. Strong and powerful, so that the next time you have a crucial conversation with someone that you've maybe been dreading, you feel empowered to use the words that come from your strength. You feel empowered to make decisions in your life that help you to feel strong. If it makes sense for you to take time off from social media, if it makes sense for you to say, "No, I'm sorry, I can't work overtime," if it makes sense for you to ask for help with the dishes, if it makes sense for you to start taking action on a goal that you have long wanted to create in your life. That is the power of the first chakra moving through your body. Let that feeling wash over you as the color red spins around your whole body. The feeling of personal strength, of feeling like you've got this. You know that the world is an abundant place. You know that whatever— literally whatever you manifest, whatever you think in your mind, you can manifest and create. You need to make more money, you want to have a different job, you want to create something for your children, you want to visit a place you've never done before. You can create all of that. You have within you the strength and the power to do so. I want you to take this with you wherever you go today, wherever you are, however you start to live your life as we move out from this practice. If you're lying in shavasana, I want you to start to wiggle your toes and your fingers and just reach your arms over your head, getting a nice stretch, stretching from your fingertips down to your toe tips. When it feels ready, rolling onto your right side into a fetal position, taking a moment there, and then joining us in our final Sukhasana, or easy seated pose. Maybe keep your eyes closed for as long as you can. Bring your hands to the heart center in Anjali Mudra. First, I want you to thank yourself for empowering yourself to take this class today. For empowering yourself to be here. Thank you. Thank you for doing that. Next, I want you to think about how you're going to take this into the world so that you can then affect others in a positive way. And maybe that's just continuing your practice, coming here every day and doing yoga with me. Maybe it is doing journaling. Maybe it is making move toward the goal that you're trying to do. However you want to put this into actual action and practice. I want you to start to manifest that, start to create that. Taking a deep inhale. Om. The light within me honors the divine and beautiful light within each and every one of you. Thank you so much for coming to class today. That was really awesome. That was really good class, y'all. I really loved it. Namaste. Thank you, friends. Thank you so much. Everything that you might possibly need is in the description. There's also a, uh, first comment that I have pinned with some useful information. I would love for you to join me in some of my things that are not here, uh, on YouTube, and I would love to have you in my community. Thank you so much for coming today to class. I really appreciate you. Make sure that you subscribe and like this video so that more people get— reach the benefit of these cool yoga classes, and I'll see you in the next class. Mwah! Thank you, friends.