Yin Yoga at The Petroleum Club
Yin Yoga now at
“The Petroleum Club”
Amanda Powers and Kimberly Hardick
“Learning to Fly”
Adaptive Yoga Training November 2010
I am pleased to announce Yin Yoga is now being offered exclusively for the members of Fort Worths’ Petroleum Club. Class takes place every Tuesday at 5:15 pm and we typically meet in the “Derek” room. Please come try a class out for yourself. Upon arrival please remember to check with the front desk to confirm the room we are in. “My teaching style is considerate to all levels of skill and ability and focuses on overall flexibility, mobility and relaxation.” A. Powers
To learn more about Yin Yoga, check out the article below from the Los Angeles Times dated September 21, 2009 by Janet Kinosian.
Yin yoga: yang-style’s less aggressive counterpart
Taoist-based practice targets the connective tissues, ligaments, joints and synovial fluid.
The power or “yang-styled” yoga forms so popular in the West — with their fast shifts between poses and emphasis on sweat — have left a gap for more meditative, longer-held stretches, says Paul Grilley, a martial arts and yoga practitioner who helped develop the yin yoga style along with fellow proponent Sarah Powers.
He says yin yoga is not a new form, but rather a return to more meditative, traditional yoga. Slower forms — such as restorative yoga — already exist, he acknowledges, relying on props to aid with poses and encouraging students to stop when they start to feel discomfort.
But with yin yoga, he says, the emphasis is not on a lack of pain, but rather on how to feel discomfort, stay with it and move through it.
Yin yoga relies on several core poses that, on first look, do not appear difficult. Most focus on the lower half of the body, such as the hips, pelvis, inner thighs and lower spine. The difficulty lies in the length of time the poses are held without shifting or movement.
Each pose is held from two to up to 20 minutes, and long, deeply held breaths coincide with the stretches. This provides for a meditative and mind-clearing practice that helps practitioners learn how to focus on the moment, proponents say, thus reducing anxiety, tension and stress.
Some of the names and yin poses are similar to their yang counterparts, such as “corpse pose” and “child’s pose,” though most have been altered and renamed.
The faster-paced yang-style yoga, such as ashtanga or vinyasa, targets lengthening and strengthening the muscles, says Oregon-based Grilley, who teaches yoga nationally and internationally and wrote “Yin Yoga: A Quiet Practice” in 2002. Taoist-based yin yoga targets the connective tissues, ligaments, joints and synovial fluid and the energy channels or meridians that the philosophy hypothesizes runs through them.
Adds the San Francisco-based Powers: “This means that instead of coming into a pose for a short amount of time and hugging the bones close together by engaging our muscles, [one] needs to pull the skeleton apart non-aggressively and with appropriate pressure and then remain stationary a while, allowing the muscles to remain stretched but without engaging them.”
Yin poses are not an attempt to stretch the ligaments and connective tissue but to load them appropriately, she says.
Kelly McGonigal, a yoga instructor and psychologist at Stanford University and the editor of the International Journal of Yoga Therapy, elaborates.
“The fourth minute [of a stretch] is not like the first,” she says. “If you pull something fast and hard, you don’t get a benefit; but if you keep applying moderate, slow and longer pressure, it will eventually relax.”
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/sep/21/health/he-yin-yoga21#
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