Yin Yoga for Beginners

Hello everyone, welcome to Beginner Yin Yoga. This yoga class is designed to teach you everything you need to know to feel confident to take a yin yoga class. So by the time we finish this class today, you should feel like you can go to any yoga studio or take any other online yoga class that's a yin yoga class and feel like you fit right in. So with that being said, let's go ahead and get started. If you've never met me before, my name is Angelica. I teach online yoga teacher training, 200-hour, 300-hour, and 500-hour courses. They're all Yoga Alliance approved, they're all online, and I only teach students one-on-one. So that's very unique and unlike anything else that's out there. If you're looking to get certified to teach yoga, these courses are designed to take you from literally knowing nothing about yoga to being able to masterfully teach a class within 10 weeks. So let me know if you're interested in that. All the links are below in the description. I would love to work with you. Even if you don't want to become a yoga teacher and you just want to learn more about yoga, these courses are great. The 200 hours of vinyasa, the 300-hour will teach you yin, vinyasa, restorative, ashtanga, acro yoga, chair yoga. There's a lot in there. There's a lot. There's a lot. It's amazing. So let's go ahead and get started. One of the things that you're going to want to have when you go to a yin yoga practice is maybe a yoga mat, right? So maybe we want to have a yoga mat, but it's not necessary, but they're nice to have. It's also okay to just have a really big blanket that you lay out and you can do your yin yoga practice there. Props were not traditionally used in Yin Yoga, but they've been added over the years because people really love them. I got this bolster on Amazon for $35. It's the same bolster that I used in my yoga studios that I had before I sold them. So these bolsters are really strong and they're nice and thick. I love them. If you don't have a bolster, it's okay to substitute with blankets, um, pillows, a couch cushion, anything like that. Now I'm a big fan of these yoga props called the 3 Minute Egg because they're shaped to conform to your body, so they slide right under your body in places that are nice and rounded that you would never be able to do with a square block. These are kind of hard to come by. You can go to the 3 Minute Egg. They have— they're on Instagram, they're on Facebook, and they have a website. You can also hit me up and I'll send you the link to go there. I am not sponsored by them. I do not get any money from them, but I absolutely love their product. It is amazing. It's really great for yin yoga. If you don't have that, you could just use a block. If you don't have a block, you can just use books. Books are easy to use as well. All right, so I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 of them. I actually have 6, but one is in my car and I didn't feel like going and getting it, so we have 5. 2 is typically what people start with. I also have a Mexican blanket, and, um, these are great for just sitting on to give yourself a little bit of elevation and to help you get into poses. They're good in shavasana to help you relax. Mine's a little bit twisted right now and could use a refold. It's nice to have them folded really nicely in your practice because you don't like to feel those bumpy bits when you're doing your class. Okay. A lot of people sit on them, so you just take them right underneath your bum and see how that lifts me up a little bit. What do you got, crinkly? There you go. Okay, it lifts me up just a little bit, so it makes it easier to fold forward and it just makes a little bit more relaxing in your practice. Now, um, we'll go ahead and get started, and as we're doing some of the poses today, I'll just explain to you the different ways that we do yin yoga. I'm going to go ahead and start my— I'm doing 75 Hard, so I want to get credit for my yoga class. So I'm going to go ahead and start that. I don't typically play music in my yoga classes, and the reason why I don't do that is because I like the silence. If you don't like silence and you want to have some music, go ahead and pick out your own music and play it in the background. We're not together, you're— we're in a totally online scenario, so you can play any kind of music that you want and it'll still be great. I also sometimes like music, but it's, you know, I want you to just choose what you want. It doesn't matter. Some people like chill music. Some people like to listen to classical music. Some people like to listen to edgier music. Whatever you want to listen to is totally perfect. Alright, so there are 3 tenets of Yin Yoga. There are 3 things that you always want to do when you're doing Yin Yoga, and the first is to find your edge. So the edge for you could be anywhere. Each of us is going to be individual and different. The cool thing that I really love about teaching online is that you don't have to look like me. We can just look like whatever we look like in our pose. So we're going to start in the butterfly, which is a wide pose, and I'm going to scoot back so you can see me. So maybe you sit on the edge of your blanket, maybe you don't, and you're just going to bend your knees, bring the soles of your feet together, and you'll let it come kind of wide. So instead of pulling it close to you, it's going to be nice and wide. And then from here, you could stay upward, or you could just fold forward nicely. Wherever that feels like your edge, that's the point that you want to go to. So when you're just starting to feel some sensation— we don't want to feel really intense sensations, we're not forcing ourselves into a deep forward fold, we're just feeling a little bit of sensation. The reason why is because the second tenet of yin yoga is to find stillness. So we want to find something that gives our body a little bit of stress but not too much so that we can find that stillness. And then the third tenet is to hold for time. So if you don't have any props, this right here would be totally a great way to just hold this pose, and we'll hold it for a few minutes. So if you do have a prop, you can take it and just put it right here and just fold fold over that. You could even put it up here and fold over this way. Whatever feels comfortable to you is where you want to go. Each person is going to be a little bit different, and your body is going to be a little bit different. When we're in our yin yoga poses, we want to try and not do a lot of movement. We don't want to fiddle and move around and get into different, um, parts of the pose. We want to just hold it, and we want to do that just focused on our breath and in a stillness. And that's why a lot of people will say that the yin practice is actually a lot harder than the faster practices of yoga, because you're having to hold it for longer periods of time. But here we have this Butterfly Pose, and we're just holding on to it. And one of the things about yin yoga is that we're not trying to work with muscle here so much as we're trying to work with bone, connective tissue, the fascia, and joints. So a lot of times in these poses you're wanting to get deeper because you're wanting to open up your muscles more. But in yin yoga, we're not opening our muscles. We're working on the part— other parts of our body that don't typically get a lot of work. So we're working on the joints, we're working on the fascia, we're working on the connective tissue, we're working on the compression of the bones. And that is just one of the really beautiful parts of this practice. So let's go ahead and we're gonna just keep holding here as we breathe and And I'm gonna just have you do like maybe 30 seconds without me talking, just being able to feel juicy in this pose. And then go ahead and just very slowly walk it out. That's another part of the yin yoga practice, is that when we move out of postures, we want to move out really slow. We're going to take our prop, and if you have one, and just move it over to the side. And then maybe you want to help the knees come back up by bringing them together and extending your legs out. We always do some kind of counter pose to our pose in yin yoga. Typically the teacher will suggest some kind of counter pose, but you don't have to do that. You can do kind of your own thing. I mean, at least in my class, I don't get really offended about that kind of thing, and just like, do what makes you feel good. Um, some teachers aren't like that, but I tend to be more of the— if it's not like obnoxious, if you're not doing a headstand and something totally different than what the rest of us are doing. So an easy way to just kind of counteract this butterfly pose is to bubble the legs out. A really typical yin is to bring your hands behind you and open your chest, or windshield wipers. That's another one that's really popular in yin practice. I'm so glad that you're here today. Thank you for coming to class. Class. It's always fun to teach yoga and to be able to reach people like you all over the world. That's pretty awesome. All right, so the next pose we're gonna do is called the Caterpillar. It is a really easy forward fold. We're just gonna stay in the same position. If you find you want a little bit more lift, you can sit onto a block and and that'll give you a little bit more lift. For some people, especially for men who find a lot of tightness in their back and in their legs, sitting on a block really helps them to get that forward movement that they need. I'm just gonna stay seated on my Mexican blanket, and we'll go ahead and just fold forward. Now remember, we said that in our yin yoga practice, we're just coming to a point where we start to feel it. Then we try to get to a point of stillness, and then we hold for time. If you have no props, that's totally perfect because Yin was designed to be without props. But if you have a prop and you want to use one, you can just use that to lean forward onto. It doesn't matter If you have one or if you don't have one, you can still do the pose. But if you want to get one of these bolsters, they're really amazing. And I'm not trying to tell you to be a consumer, but they are really awesome. I really love it. I also use this in restorative practice, not just in yin. And, um, I kind of like restorative a little bit more than yin sometimes because it just You just get to close your eyes and relax. So now we're in the holding it for time period. You'll feel this in the back of your legs and you'll feel it in your low back. We want to breathe in and out through our nose during our entire yin practice. Really, during any yoga practice, you're gonna breathe in and out through the nose because that helps to lower our fight or flight response. So I noticed that, like, having my head up and looking at the camera is giving me a little bit of a pinching sensation in my neck, so I'm gonna just bring my head down. And that is a really big tenet of yin yoga, is that when something feels like it hurts, we back off of it and make an adjustment, because the point isn't to achieve some kind of aesthetic or some kind of look or some kind of— this is the way the pose is done. The point is to find ourselves in that posture in such a way that we're completely connected with our own body. So we'll just breathe here, and I'll let you go into the stillness of the pose without me talking. If it feels good, you can come deeper into the pose. If it doesn't, you can stay where you are. If you're experiencing any kind of pain, always back off. Remember that I can't be there with you, so I can't possibly know or being responsible for your body. You have got to back off if it feels painful. You have to find your own pain points. You have to be responsible for yourself. That's crucial and super important in any kind of anything that you're doing. If you want to close your eyes in these poses, that's always really nice. From here, we're going to go ahead and really nice and slow just walk our way out, really slowly moving out of the posture. If you have a bolster, you can put it to the side. If you don't, you don't need to. There isn't anything to put to the side. Then from here, counterpose. We're going to do some windshield wipers. So just bringing our hands behind our back, if that feels good, bending the knees and letting the knees go wide side to side as we windshield wipe metaphorically with our legs. You're doing a great job. Alright, we're going to move now down onto our stomach and we're gonna do some back bends. So if you had a blanket underneath of you or a block, just take it out from underneath of you and we'll roll forward onto our stomach. So I'm gonna start here. I'm gonna move the camera back a little bit. I'm gonna start in an easy pose, a Sphinx pose, and there are a couple different ways you can do this on your arms. So you can grab on opposite elbows, or you can have your hands forward and Or if you want, you can use a bolster. So again, I'm going to— when I adjusted that, it made it crooked. I hate it crooked. I hate it crooked. Okay, I cannot with the crooked camera, right? I can't do that. All right, so I'm going to use the bolster now just to show you what that looks like, and it'll give you more of a backbend. Just like this. Good. Pregnant women will find that they'll really like to use the bolster because it gives the belly a spot to go into. You could also forego all of that and come into what is called the seal pose, and that's where you use your hands and press up. But I find that incredibly uncomfortable. I do not like to do that pose, and so I don't do it because I'm almost 50 and I don't do anything that I don't want to do. And I wish that I knew that when I was like 20. Like, when I was 20, if I would have been like I don't do what I don't want to do. I would have had a much better life. People would always tell me that too, but I would just be like, no. Okay, so now we want to focus on where you feel the sensation. So where are you most feeling this? For me, I I'm feeling it in like kind of my tailbone area in my lower back. So in the, my lumbar spine, like in the lower part of the lumbar spine is where I'm feeling it the most. You might be feeling it somewhere different. So take a moment to just think about where are you feeling it? Where is it creating sensation in the body? This is not to say to move around or to do it differently or that you're not doing the pose right. It's about connecting with yourself. That's what the yin yoga practice is really about, is the connection with the self. So are you connecting with yourself in this pose and starting to understand how your body really feels? I feel like now more than ever we've really moved away from this understanding of how our body feels and what our body really needs to thrive and to feel good. And so our yin yoga practice can bring us back to that feeling of feeling good and really thriving and enjoying ourselves. We'll just hold here for time, breathing in and out through the nose. Personally, in this pose, I like to roll my shoulders back a little bit. Everybody's gonna be different, but if you try that, you'll notice that it shifts where the feeling is in the pose. Let's just hold for time. Maybe close your eyes and breathe. We'll go ahead and slowly open our eyes. If you're using any kind of prop, you want to just really slowly come down and move it out of the way. If you're not using a prop, just go ahead and really slowly come down. And you're going to use your hands here as a pillow. I'm going to roll my hips back and forth just to get a little bit of openness there. And then I'm turning my head to the left, so I'm going to bend my left knee and bring it up toward my left elbow. And we'll just hold this for a few breaths. We'll go ahead and let that left leg come down. Turn your head to the right and let the right knee come up now, and we'll just hold this for time. Okay, we're gonna go ahead and just slowly come back up now. All right, we're going to do some work on the hips. If you're in a yin yoga class and it feels like doing the Swan Pose is too much for you, you could do the variation lying on your back. Now the variation lying on your back— I'm gonna lie on my back— and then you'll bend your knees, you'll bring your right foot over your left foot here, and then you'll take your hands, you'll bring your right hand in between your legs and your left hand will come to the outside of your left leg. You'll just pull yourself together here. You'll start to feel this in the right hip. If that feels good to you, you can just stay there. If you're working with any kind of knee injury, this might not be the right pose for you, and you might want to just back off, maybe bring your feet onto the ground and just press the right knee open. If you want to come into the Swan Pose, this is also known in regular yoga as Pinchasana. Pigeon. I'm going to tell you a little bit about why the poses are named what they're named. You could just bring the right leg forward, left leg comes back, and we'll fold forward. Now, if you want more of a stretch, you'll bring this foot further up. Less of a stretch, and you'll bring the foot further in. You can fold forward, or you can stay up. You can use a bolster and be on top of the bolster. You could use a couple of blocks if you wanted to. I've got my eggs here. I could just be on those if that made sense for me. Or you could just be up like this if that makes sense for you. You want to be in where you feel the sensation that you want to feel. It's about determining what sensation you want to feel each day. See, that's the cool thing about yin yoga is that it's very individualized. All right, we're going to go ahead and find our point, and then we'll hold for stillness and hold for time. Yin yoga poses are named differently than the traditional yoga poses because the founder of yin yoga, Paul Greerley, did not want these poses to be mixed up with the ideologies behind the regular yoga poses. So even though some of them look similar, he really wanted us to do them differently. Now, Yin Yoga was founded by Paul Grilley, and he's still alive. He's not a super old dude. This is a newer practice, a newer style of yoga. And he studied under a man named Pauli Zink, who did a lot of Zen-type movements in Tai Chi. And he then made the Yin Yoga offshoot. And then a man named Bertie Clark kind of took that on and really started to make it very popular. He also worked with a woman named Sarah Powers, who also worked with Paul Grilley. To develop yin yoga. So that's where it comes from. That's the history of it. It's not an Indian tradition. It's not a really old practice. Uh, Paul Grilly is— I think he's American, and Bernie Clark is Canadian. So it's a very Western practice. We're just holding here for time, settling into the pose, noticing with detached awareness where you feel it. Not making any judgments on yourself, just noticing the body. It's the whole point of the yin yoga practice, to just notice, awareness, release. No judgments. Judgment Detox, if you read that book, it's a really good one. All right, we'll slowly walk our hands up. You've got two options here for your counter pose. You can curl under the toe, bend the knee, and just come back into a nice tabletop pose. Maybe you could do some C curves, curving the body into a C, doing that. Maybe some cat-cow if that feels organic to you, or you could just come into Downward facing dog. Mm, that is juicy, juicy. Downward dog, bending the knees, maybe walking your dog. There's always options here. Then we'll move into the other side. So left leg, if you're lying on your back, you'll lie on your back and do the left side. If you're not lying on your back and you want to come into the Swan, you'll do the left side. There's breathing here, in and out through the nose. While we're doing our practice, we're connecting with all the different principles of yin yoga. So I'm hoping that by now you're feeling a lot more confident and you are feeling like you can take on a yin yoga class, maybe in person or any yin yoga class online. Um, I will link a playlist of yin yoga classes so that you can watch a bunch of mine. I have a lot of them online on YouTube and I love to share. I love to share yin yoga. I love to share yoga in general. I teach over 10 different styles of yoga myself, and it's really evolved over the years what I practice and what I teach and what I'm interested in. It's always changing, and that's really the beautiful thing about just yoga in general is there's so many styles of yoga that you could literally just do all different kinds. I keep checking my watch for time, for time. Seems like time is always going a little bit faster the older you get. Slowing time through slowing the breath. The Yin Yoga practice is considered difficult because of the long holds, because of having to be in these poses for a long time. And you might find that the sensation is really intense for you, and it's okay to back off, and it's okay to come back. This is not the kind of practice where you're just pushing yourself through, like, just rip-roaring and tearing through, like, I'm just forcing myself to do this. No, that is not the, that is not the tatva of yin. We're connecting with the body. We're being one. We are understanding our body. We're being kind and gentle to our body. Just do another 45 seconds here, just breathing in and out through the nose. If the mind wanders, just bring it back to the breath. Alright, we're gonna go ahead and slowly walk it up. Again, you can come into tabletop, you can come into downward dog, or if you'd like, we can just come into a child's pose. I'm gonna come into a supported child's pose, bringing my knees wide and putting my body onto the bolster. But here are some different variations of child's pose. You can bring your knees together. You could come forward and bring your arms behind you. That's a traditional variation. That's the first way that I learned how to do child's pose way back, way back when I was 11 years old, 37 years ago. A long time. You can bring your knees out wide You can still bring your arms behind, or you can bring your arms in front of you. This is an extended child's pose. You see this a lot more commonly today. Or we can get our bolster and just lay forward onto the bolster. I love— this is in restorative as well, and I just love it. Oh my goodness, I could just lay here for forever. You let your head fall to one side, or you could just bring your head forward, whatever feels more comfortable for you. Again, it's all about finding your individual comfort, right? So like, what feels good to you, not what feels good to me, but what feels good to you. Where do you want to be? Bringing it back to the breath in and out through the nose. Just always, whenever we're doing our yin practice, we just always want to bring it back to the breath, right? So it's not just like, um, just, I gotta do this, or whatever. It's like We're just acknowledging, like, oh, my mind wandered. Okay, that's cool. I'm just gonna bring it back. Because the thing is about yoga that people just really don't get is that it's not about getting rid of all the thoughts. It's about acknowledging those thoughts and not reacting to them. Like, not being like, oh my gosh, I'm having this thought, but just like, oh, Oh, I'm having a thought. Okay, well, we'll come back to the breath. I just remembered that we're having pasta for dinner tonight and I'm super excited about that. See, this is what I'm talking about, right? You just— we just wander. That's just the human condition. And it's okay if you just, you know, Let it go, let it go, let it go. We'll go ahead and turn our head to the other side if you have your head turned to one side, and we'll just hold here for time. Nice, and I'll give you some time to be nice and quiet. And go ahead and slowly walk your way up out of your child's pose. Bring this bolster over to the side if you have a bolster. If you don't and you were just forward, just come back up. I'm gonna put my, my fancy pants on. As we move into our final poses. So as you move into your final poses, I want you to be aware of how we— the point of our practice is really not that we do all these poses, right? People do the whole yoga practice and they're like, okay, well, I'm done, that's all I was supposed to do. Um, but really the point is for meditation. So the Yoga Sutras talks about how we're doing all these asana poses— asana means pose— we're doing them all to take us to meditation. And then in meditation, that's where we start to have these realizations about our life and about how to make our lives better and how to make other people's lives better. And so the juice, the juice of the practice is in these final poses. So we're going to go ahead and just lie onto our back. We're going to do some easy twisting, and then we're going to do Shavasana, which is the final pose. And I really challenge you to stick with me because you made it this far, so why would you leave now? Don't leave now. Stay here, subscribe, come back. Hug your knees into your chest. Maybe roll a little bit, maybe do some knee rolls with your knees in different directions, maybe chaotic knee rolls. And then we're just going to let our knees come to the right as we turn our head to the left. Now If this is too much sensation for you, you can certainly bring your couch cushion over and just bring your knees onto that and let the twist. You can also bring your arms into like a cactus, or you can bring your arms overhead. You know, there's so many different options. Just the main thing is that we are doing what makes us individually feel good. Not that we're doing what, what I tell you or what some other instructor tells you, but that you're doing— you're honoring your own body, your own self, what feels good to you individually. Let us breathe here as we twist. Finding that spot and then holding for time. Thunder is starting to go in the mountains. Afternoon showers. Go ahead and slowly bring it up to center and oh Switch sides. You do not have to turn your head if you don't want to. You can just leave your head in the center if that feels more comfortable to you. Another thing to honor is that every day is going to be totally different, right? Like, you might feel one way today, and tomorrow when you do your practice, you might feel a totally different way. Every day is going to be totally different. And go with that, you know, do what's, what's working for you. You do not have to do what worked for you yesterday. You don't even have to worry about tomorrow. You just have to do this moment right now. So remember our 3 tenets of yin yoga. We come to a point where we begin to feel the pose, a point of stress, and then we find stillness, and then we hold for time. And you'll see that wherever you take yin class, whether it's online or it's in a studio, This is the tenets of Yin Yoga. Another thing to understand is that Yin Yoga is always done on a cold body, and we'll see sometimes these hot Yin classes, and it's actually like the antithesis of what Yin Yoga is and what it was meant to be. Now, when we say always, right, there's always an exception to always. But Yin Yoga really wasn't designed to be done in a hot room. The reason why is because it is meant to get into our ligaments, our connective tissues, and our joints and our bones. It can be very dangerous to do those things in a hot room, and at the very least, it is completely ineffective because We can't reach those parts of our body. We're only reaching the musculature when we're in the hot room in a yin class. So that's just more yin sites, more yin stuff. So now you're getting here close to the end of class. You got this. You're really good at it. Let's slowly bring it back up to center. You're not in a beginner anymore. I'm advancing you. I'm advancing you. Magically, you're at the next level. Alright, go ahead and we're going to do the most important pose. Let's see if you can do this after this long practice. If you're still with me, I know you can do it. Bring your arms down to your sides, palms facing up. Let your feet come out to the side. Take a deep inhale through the nose. Exhale it out the mouth. Good. Deep inhale through the nose. Exhale it out the mouth. Let your body just sink into the mat. Begin by relaxing your toes, and then relax your feet. Let your ankles relax. Let your calves relax. Let your shins relax. Feel that relaxation move up your knees to your quadriceps, your thighs, to the backs of your legs. Your hamstrings are relaxed. And now you're relaxed all the way from the tops of your legs down to your toes. Take a deep inhale. Exhale as we relax our hips and our glutes. Let our stomach relax and our low back. Maybe roll it under a little bit if that feels good to you. Let your chest relax and your back, maybe rolling under the shoulder blades, letting it really open there. Let your arms come to your sides and your palms face face up. You can have palms facing up to receive, palms facing down to hold the energy in. You can bring your hands onto your stomach. If you're not feeling comfortable with your eyes closed, that's totally okay. Just let your eyes focus on a point in front of you that's not moving and just kind of zone out there. Let the relaxation trickle down and move all the way to your fingertips. So your elbows are relaxed and your arms and your armpits are relaxed. Relax in your neck. Let your ears relax and every part of your face, relaxing your lips, your tongue, your nose, your cheeks. Let your eyes relax in the socket. Let the forehead relax. And now let the crown of the head relax as it trickles relaxation down all of your body, imagining that a color, any color of your choosing, is going from the crown of your head all the way down to your toes. I'm going to choose The color green. Green for the heart chakra. Filling my whole body with the color green. Filling me with love and abundance. Love for the world. Love for you. And I'll just become quiet now so that you can enjoy your final resting pose. Slowly begin to wiggle your fingers and your toes. Gently reaching your arms over your head, getting a nice stretch from the fingertips down to the toe tips, bending your knees. We're going to go ahead and roll over onto our right side. We roll onto the right side to protect the heart. When we sleep at night, we want to sleep on our right side. If we're side sleepers, that also protects the heart. Unless you're pregnant, and then you go on the left side and do whatever your doctor says. I am no expert on pregnancy. Then use your left hand to press your way up, coming into a nice easy seated pose. We'll face each other now. Oh, thank you so much for coming to class with me today. This was a really beautiful class. I really appreciate you for being here. We'll go ahead and collectively end the class. Bring your hands to the heart center in Anjali Mudra. Lengthen through the spine, relax down through the shoulders, close the eyes, tuck the chin. As we go out from our practice today and go into the world, wherever you are in the world, whatever time of day it is, May each person that you interact with feel the love and the light within your heart. What you have cultivated here today, let that shine out to others. Taking a deep inhale, we'll end with an Om. Om. The light within me honors the divine and beautiful light within each and every one of you. Thank you so much, I appreciate you. Namaste. Thank you so much. Oh, I love you so much. You could do me some karma favor of just liking this video and subscribing. It really helps me out a ton. I'm trying to get to 1,000 subscribers and I really use your help. Please share this video with your friends. If you have any questions, hit me up. Again, if you want to become certified to teach yoga, also you can go to the link in the description below. I only work with people one-on-one because I love doing that and it really helps you find success. So I'll see you in the next class. I'm super blissed out. This was great. Mwah! Thank you. You did a great job. I'm super proud of you. You were awesome. And I'm letting you know right now, you can go and take Yin Yoga anywhere. You are now— you're now certified in being a student of Yin Yoga. Bye, friends. See you next time.