xiPREFACE
Naturally, when you discover something amazing, you want to share it with
as many people as possible. After getting hit by a car as a pedestrian, I was
left injured, scared, and feeling down—that is, until I found yin yoga. It was
life changing!
As a teacher, I started incorporating yin yoga at the end of my power yoga
classes in Santa Monica. We called the class Yoga Stretch because back then,
yin classes were extremely rare. People loved it! I was surprised, because
I thought people would be bored. I mean, who wants to sit around doing
nothing, discovering uncomfortable places in the body, and dealing with
the challenging mental component? Plus, if you've been running away from
something, it will be able to catch up with you when you become still. This
can be challenging because you will need to confront it. In yin yoga, stillness
helps you to face these things and triggers physical, emotional, and spiritual
processes that can holistically improve your health. Fortunately, the students
in my first yin class got it, and the class quickly became popular among a
wide range of people.
From there, I started teaching yin yoga in teacher trainings and retreats,
and although it wasn't love at first sight for a lot of people, I did notice that it
seemed to fill a void. Students reported to me that their longstanding injuries
were starting to heal, their sleep improved immensely, their bodies became
more flexible, their stress levels dropped, and most important, they began to
notice positive benefits in their relationships and careers.
I filmed yin yoga practices for The Ultimate Yogi and Yoga 30 for 30 pro-
grams, and that spread the power of yin to students in more than 40 coun-
tries worldwide. All sorts of people were introduced to yin for the first time.
Professional athletes, celebrities, entertainers, business executives, health care
practitioners, teachers, and lawyers reached out, sharing how yin yoga was
changing their lives.
Now more than ever, people need yin yoga to balance the fast pace of
modern life. Moving at such a hurried and frenetic pace can lead to high levels
of stress, illness, and depression and is not sustainable. At some point, you
have to ease your foot off the pedal and just let the engine idle. Better yet,
just switch the engine off. Otherwise the engine will blow.
Yin yoga provides us an opportunity to slow down, to go within, and to go
deep. Some cultures call it the sacred pause. It's within that pause, or moment
of stillness, that we come back to our inner most essence. By dropping into
this stillness, we find our center. When we are centered, things don't throw