After school yoga classes are starting again. I split them with another teacher. She loves vinyasa. This year, on my weeks, I’m going to try defaulting to yin, with probably some gentle and restorative flows thrown in. It’s a nice way to appeal to a wider variety of students, and — if I’m being totally honest — I hope it’s an effective way to distinguish myself as a teacher.
I am experiencing a little emotional discomfort at the thought of me, as the physically larger person — the one who’s more likely to be stereotyped as unfit — being the person who also regularly teaches yin and gentle courses. I have this secret worry that others will think this is all I can teach, all I can do, even though I recognize it as a thought process that privileges certain kinds of movement (vinyasa yoga) over others (yin yoga), which is unkind and untrue. I think it’s important to acknowledge that discomfort even as I work to let it go.
Anyway, this is the sequence I used for my first teaching yin class. My goals, as I explained to students, were:
- to bring sensation to the upper, middle, and lower back regions.
- to put the spine through all its types of motion: forward bending, back bending, twisting, and side bending.
- not to overwhelm with too much sensation, which can sometimes be a Thing for folks unfamiliar with yin practices.
There are certainly ways to make most of these postures more intense, and I offered most of them to students — but after I’d guided them into the initial pose. That way, students wanting more sensation could take it, but students wanting to stay where they were — or wanting to back off later — had a clear point of return.
Length: about 45 minutes (with standard holds)
Props: a block, possibly a strap for janu sirsasana
All poses held for 3 minutes unless otherwise specified. Also, feel free to work in some gentle movements — whatever feels right — between longer holds.
The practice:
- Child’s pose.
- Twisting child’s pose — The one that looks like this (option 1) or this (option 2), rather than the one with the thighs more vertical. We’ll try that someday. Today is not that day.
- Sphinx, with the option of moving to seal pose after 90 seconds. Alternately, I offered the option of sphinx with the elbows resting on blocks (we don’t have bolsters) if a middling height is better.
- This prone shoulder opening twist on each side. Even though I’ve just spent nine minutes there, I like to press back to child’s pose for a breath in between sides.
- Revolved janu sirsasana on one side, though initially offered without the raised arm. Additionally, rather than resting the bottom arm on the ground, I initially offer it with the arm resting on a block at any stable height.
- Janu sirsasana, on the same side, holding on where comfortable and feeling free to round the spine and relax. Depending on the amount of forward movement, it can be nice to place a block, on any suitable height, under the forehead to support the neck.
- Repeat the revolved janu sirsasana/janu sirsasana sequence on the other side.
- Butterfly, again possibly with the block as a head support.
- Savasana.
At least for me, this brings a relatively milder — compared to other yin practices — amount of sensation to a relatively larger area of my body. In addition to impacting my upper, middle, and lower spine, this sequence also impacts my shoulders, side body, and part of my hips and groins. While I definitely feel it as it’s happening, it’s not so intense as to leave me “reminders” after the practice is done.
