16 A JOURNEY INTO YIN YOGA
What some people overlook is how physical and athletic meditation actually
is. If you’ve meditated for over 20 to 30 minutes, you begin to notice all sorts
of sensations that arise within the body. You feel discomfort, aches, pains,
and tension in the hips, knees, ankles, and spine. Sometimes the discomfort
becomes so unbearable that you have to stop the meditation prematurely. The
yogis, wanting to become fully liberated, used these postures to work out the
kinks and make the body more supple. Then they could withstand longer
and longer seated meditations. The yoga poses were created to support the
meditation. This concept in the West has been lost by many.
In the late 1600s another hatha yoga text was released called the Gheranda
Samhita, which expanded the posture library to 32 asanas. This particular
text started to shift the game: Two-thirds of the poses were stronger with a
yang-like quality, and just one-third had a softer, more yin-like quality. Up to
this point, it had been the other way around. This trend continued as hatha
yoga evolved into a more active, strong, and eventually athletic style. More
yoga poses were developed, many of which were inspired by gymnastics,
wrestling, and other exercise.
Krishnamacharya, known as the godfather of modern-day yoga, knew
about 3,000 postures and taught vinyasa krama. This style of yoga links a
movement with a breath and induces a powerful flow state. Krishnamacharya
taught and inspired many legendary teachers, such as B.K.S. Iyengar, Pattabhi
Jois, T.K.V. Desikachar, and Srivatsa Ramaswami.
Although it’s beautiful on some level that yoga has become so popular and
spread so rapidly, you can see how in certain ways it’s become disconnected
from its roots. If hatha yoga is about balance between the yang and yin, which
we will dive much deeper into in the next chapter, and most classes are very
yang-like, then we are creating imbalance.
When yoga began thousands of years ago, it was about meditation. And
the earliest yogis meditated in a seated posture. They held this seated posture
in stillness for extended periods, sometimes hours. As you will soon learn,
this very much qualifies as yin yoga. From this perspective, the first form of
physical yoga was yin yoga. It might not have had a name, but that’s what
it was. As we learned earlier, the seated poses of the Hatha yoga tradition
became greatly diminished in favor of the strong standing postures. Like the
element of water that yields eventually, the early forms of Hatha yoga adapted
and, as yin yoga adapted, found a new and wonderful path that manifests
even stronger and more transformative.MODERN HISTORY OF YIN YOGA
In 2005, I signed up for a yin yoga workshop at Santa Monica Yoga. I had
no idea what to expect or what I was getting into. From a little research, I
knew that the teacher was a world-renowned kung fu artist and that he had
developed this unique style of yoga. That’s about all I knew.