5 Yin Poses for Calm in Uncertain Times

Therapeutic yoga seeks to bring us into balance -- not only within our bodies but with the world around us. Through pranayama, asana and meditation, we find ways to balance our current internal and external states with what is needed to nourish us physically, mentally and emotionally.

So when we find ourselves in times of extreme uncertainty -- which seems to be the collective global experience these days -- therapeutic yoga is a critical tool to help with the anxiety, depression, and sedentary states that may result. One therapeutic modality to consider trying is Yin. In Yin yoga, the focus is on holding poses for long periods of time (three to five minutes) to access the connective tissue that holds our form together. By cultivating stillness in the body and mind, we are better able to counterbalance the chaos and uncertainty of the world around us.

Yin yoga can be highly beneficial to calm and balance the nervous system. Why?

●      By holding poses for an extended period, we can actually lengthen and manipulate the fascia and connective tissue, helping keep it supple and healthy, even as we age.

●      In Yin yoga, we strive to find a balance between effort and ease by stretching to about a level six out of 10 -- if level one is just lying in bed, no effort at all, and 10 is the deepest stretch you’ve ever felt, you want to be around the middle of that spectrum.

●      Finally, Yin asks us to practice with patience and respect for our bodies and minds, and to maintain a heightened state of awareness throughout the practice.

Here are five Yin poses to try to calm the anxious and unsettled mind.

1)    Caterpillar -- This is most closely related to what you may know as paschimottanasana, or a seated forward fold in a vinyasa class. Folding inward can help focus the mind and calm the nervous system.

Begin seated with your legs extended, and bring one or two bolsters on top of your thighs. Lift tall through the spine and fold over your legs, letting your chest rest on the bolsters (adjust how much support depending on where your level six is). While your vinyasa teacher might have instructed you to keep your spine long, it’s okay in this Yin pose to let the spine round, feeling a stretch across the low back. If your hamstrings are tight, you can widen your legs and bend your knees to create more space. Hold for four minutes.

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2)    Sleeping swan -- You likely know this as pigeon pose. Not only does this also serve as a forward fold, helping to instill a sense of security, but it also opens the hips, which helps release tension held in the pelvis.

Beginning on all fours, bring your left foot forward by your left hand. Walk the left foot across to the right hand, slide the right knee back until both hips reach the mat. If your left hip remains lifted, bring a blanket or bolster underneath it for support. Gently release your chest onto a bolster, releasing the upper body completely.

If this feels more intense than a level six, you can slide your left ankle back toward the left hip, creating a gentler stretch for the outer left hip.

Once comfortable, this is a great opportunity to come into meditation. Notice the temperature of your breath as it enters the nostrils, and then as it leaves the nostrils. Has the temperature changed? How about the color -- does the breath look the same on the inhale and the exhale? Continue to breathe and focus on the look or feel of the breath for four minutes on each side.

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3)    Viparita karani -- In English, this pose is known as “legs up the wall” which is about as simple an explanation as you can get. You’ll need an empty wall for this pose. To begin, bring one hip right to the wall, and swing your legs up it, lying your torso back on the ground to form a 90 degree angle. Bring a blanket underneath your skull to give it a bit of padding, and it may feel nice to bring another blanket or block to your belly to increase the feeling of groundedness. You can bring your arms to a T, above your head, to your sides, or hands can rest somewhere on your body. Hold this pose for five minutes.

This pose is especially beneficial if you’ve been on your feet all day or been traveling, as it helps reverse blood flow from the feet and bring it back to the vital organs, while gently stretching the backs of the legs.

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4)    Snail -- Begin lying on your back, with your back and shoulders on a folded up blanket, while the head neck are off of it. Lift your hps and support them with your hands. Let the feet come behind the head, taking caution to maintain plenty of space between the cervical spine and the mat. Your feet can touch the floor behind your head, although they do not need to, and can remain dangling in space. Round the spine.

Snail pose serves to release pressure on the spine, and cradle the heart, calming the nervous system in the heart space. Hold this pose for three minutes, and roll gently down to lie on the mat and let the spine neutralize.

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5)    Reclining twist -- This is a simple supine spinal twist. By nature, spinal twists can help bring equilibrium to the nervous system and release tension in the spine, while also stimulating the internal organs.

To enter, bring the knees to the left side, while twisting the upper body toward the right. Your gaze can be toward the ceiling or over the right shoulder. If you need to back off the twist a bit, a bolster under your knees and/or a blanket underneath your right shoulder can help give some extra support. Bring your left arm anywhere that feels comfortable. You can also move the knees toward or away from your head to adjust the sensation. Hold for three minutes, pause in savasana, and then repeat on the next side.  

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The next time you find yourself watching the news or scrolling through Twitter, only to find your heart begin to race and your mind begin to spiral, consider taking a few moments to practice a couple of these postures to help find calm in these uncertain times.

 References:

Paulie Zink, often referred to as the founder of Yin yoga

Videos on Yin yoga asanas, by Bernie Clark

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Hannah Slocum Darcy is a yoga teacher and a student at Prema Yoga Institute. She specializes in accessibility and adaptive practice for many life stages and scenarios.

Yoga in Quarantine: Tips for Cultivating a Home Practice

“Yogas chitta vritti nirodah,” the second of Pantajali’s Yoga Sutras, is likely the verse most recognizable to yogis of any level of experience.  A seminal tenet of yoga philosophy, it literally translates to “Yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind.” A more modern, colloquial interpretation might be, “Yoga quiets the mind chatter,” and I bet I speak for all of us when I say that at this moment, I really need to spend some time each day quieting the chatter in my mind.  We are living in a historical moment unprecedented in our lifetimes, and it is all too easy, shut up in our homes and consuming the news, to allow atmospheric anxiety and personal worry to escalate into the full abandon of panic.  Over the past week, in my non-yoga life as a university instructor, I probably wrote the phrase “Don’t freak out” over and over again in upwards of sixty emails.  And yet, last night when a server crashed, I freaked out, my students totally freaked out, and my husband, at loose ends with his workplace closed, stayed up all night fretting and then drank a beer at 1:00 pm today and lay down for what he referred to as a “stress nap.” Right now, just when we all need yoga in our lives more than ever, our studios are closed and the governor is telling us to stay in our homes. 

The governor is right: we do need to practice radical social distancing as much as we possibly can in order to gain control of this crisis.  But we don’t have to give up our yoga practices just because we’re holed up at home.  With that in mind, here are five tips for creating and maintaining a home practice. 

1.     Create a dedicated container for your practice.  It’s wonderful to be able to have a designated space—even a room!—for your home asana practice, but most New Yorkers don’t have that luxury.  However, anywhere you have space to roll out your mat can be a sacred space if you make it so.  Create a bit of ritual around your practice: light a candle, compose a dedicated playlist on Spotify, do something to establish an intentional boundary around your physical practice, even if you’re in the living room one day and the bedroom the next.  Devoting a time of day to your practice can also be a way of creating sacred space. 

2.     Take it easy. If you are used to practicing in class with a teacher observing, be especially careful when working at home.  Don’t cut corners: take care to warm up fully, and make sure the room is at the temperature you’re accustomed to when practicing.  If you can’t get your apartment as warm as the studio, add layers, especially around your joints.

Don’t test your limits—there’s no teacher to stop you from hyper-extending or “hanging out” in your joints.  So be mindful of your hips, knees, spine (particularly your neck) and shoulders. If you’re used to being cued in and out of poses, transition slowly and mindfully, and be especially mindful of alignment.  If you feel any pain or discomfort, stop. A home practice during an epidemic is neither the time nor the place to push boundaries in your asana practice.

3.     Try practicing online.  If you’re missing class and instruction, there are plenty of options for you to practice at home with others, both in real time and asynchronously.  Prema Yoga Institute is offering live classes every day via Facebook, on a donation basis.  In addition, online yoga platforms offer a tremendous variety of options for a home practice.  PYI’s own Dana Slamp teaches via Yoga Anytime, and there’s a fifteen day free trial for their subscription service.

4.     Remember that yoga is more than asana. Just as important as maintaining a physical practice is keeping yoga alive in your mind and heart.  If you don’t have an altar in your house, now is a good time to set one up. An altar doesn’t need to be religious—it can simply be a space dedicated to cultivating mindfulness. Mine sits on top of a tiny cabinet in the corner of my bedroom and holds a salt lamp, a candle, a box with my mala, a few precious stones, and copies of The Pocket Pema Chodron and Tosha Silver’s Change Me Prayers. I sit in sukhasana every night before bed to read, breathe, and chant.

5.     Just practice.  As my teacher says, the best yoga practice is the one you do. If you’re homeschooling the kids, working online all day, taking care of loved ones, or just generally climbing the walls and can only devote ten minutes a day to your practice, then practice for ten minutes. But fire up that tapas and commit to an ongoing practice.  As the extremely prolific novelist Anthony Trollope once said, “A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labors of a spasmodic Hercules.”

During this period of intense mental stress and danger to our physical health, a steady at-home yoga practice is not only possible, it may well be a major component in keeping us mentally and physically well.  Yogic practices are proven to down-regulate the nervous system and boost immunity, and yoga in general keeps us in touch with our bodies, our breathing (!) and our bodhichitta (soft-heartedness).  A home yoga practice not only helps  us to keep functioning, it helps us to marshal our resources to support others.  So here’s a new mantra to carry into the coming weeks: keep inside, keep well, and keep practicing.

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Molly Goforth is a yoga and meditation teacher and a student at Prema Yoga Institute. She specializes in accessibility and trauma-informed yoga teaching and practice.

Yoga Therapy for the Heart: Interview with Sonja Rzepski, C-IAYT

Sonja Rzepski is an IAYT-certified yoga therapist and graduate of Prema Yoga Institute’s Yoga Therapy Program. Sonja received her initial yoga teacher certification in the inaugural teacher training of Samahita Centered Yoga Institute in 1999, and originally studied Ashtanga yoga under Eddie Stern. Sonja teaches the Yoga Therapy for Cardiac Care course for PYI; in addition, she was the lead yoga therapist for the Northwell Lenox Hill Cardiac Care Yoga program, whose work was chronicled in a recent study published in the Annals of Clinical Cardiology entitled The Yoga Meditation Heart Connection—A Pilot Study Looking to Improve Women’s Heart Health, which demonstrated a meaningful connection between yoga and meditation practices and improved well-being and decreased depression rates in female cardiac patients, as well as other benefits.

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Sonja and ask her about her work with cardiac patients as well as about yoga and heart health in general.  What follows are excerpts from that conversation.

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Molly Goforth: Can you talk a bit about how you came to your specialization in cardiac care? 

Sonja Rzepski: It honestly goes way back, because of my mom's experience of having a heart attack, and also my family history of heart disease.  I hadn’t been seeing my parents on a regular basis because I was living in New York City, and they were living upstate when my mother got a job opportunity in the city and I started seeing her regularly.  I noticed that she was looking sort of grey, that she had gained a significant amount of weight, and that she got short of breath easily, just walking down the block. I knew my grandfather had had a heart attack, and that my mother had a significant history of heart disease in her immediate family, as I mentioned.  So I asked her if she had been to the doctor, and she quite casually told me that she had seen her doctor recently and he had said that women couldn’t have heart attacks before menopause.  I asked her if he had done any tests, and she said no. My mother is an extremely upbeat, positive person, but her energy was low, and even though she was having chest pains, her doctor didn’t run any tests and put her on anti-depressants. He just didn’t consider heart disease to be a possibility for a pre-menopausal woman.

MG: I would say that’s unbelievable, but sadly, it’s not.

SR:  No, it’s not.  There is so much information regarding women and cardiac health, and how to prevent heart disease in women.  But regarding my mother, she was told it was indigestion, it was depression, it was anything but her heart.  The only reason she ended up getting an accurate diagnosis is that she happened to go to lecture given by a specialist in heart disease in women at NYU, and she found that she was checking all the boxes, so to speak, regarding her symptoms.  After the lecture she spoke to the doctor, and she ended up becoming a patient, but it took her months to get an appointment. By the time she was finally seen, she actually had a heart attack in the hospital, on the table.

MG: Oh, my God.

SR: She had 92% blockage at that point, and of course the anxiety of it all likely contributed to the cardiac event.

MG: Of course.

SR: Thank goodness she was in the right place.  I was flabbergasted, because it was my own mother and she had been so misdiagnosed for so long.  It became very educational for me; I started to go with her to appointments and I started to become fascinated at the work her doctor, Dr. Steinfeld, was doing.  I wanted to learn more and more, and I started to get more in depth and to apply what I was learning to my yoga teaching.

MG: And how did that progress?

SR: I worked with Dr. Rachel Bond and Dr. DeJesus, and I started working with their support group. They had a women's support group for heart disease and I started basically mentoring with a cardiologist and working with their patients. And thank goodness the doctors were very open-minded and generous.  I mean, I was getting amazing training right there in the hospital. So then it just grew and grew and we started a formal outpatient cardiac class at the hospital.  Our patients had had cardiac events or suffered from heart disease and were seeing the cardiologists, but were not in the hospital at that time. They would return for classes, and that's how this study came about. And then, through Prema, we were able to bring in Yoga Therapy students as mentees, to support the work and even eventually to teach.

MG: What a compelling personal story about how you came to specialize in Cardiac Care. Is you mother doing better now? 

SR: She's doing much better now right. Not only does she lead her own women's support group, she does about 20 to 25 minutes of her own yoga practice every morning.

MG: That’s so great.  Shifting gears a bit, can you speak to working in a hospital setting as a yoga therapist?  What were some of the challenges? 

SR: I think there are actually two great extremes. The cardiologists and the cardiac nurses who saw the results our yoga therapy work was having on their patients were incredibly supportive and bent over backwards to make sure that we had a lovely space to practice in and even supplied water and healthy snacks…they couldn’t have been more supportive. And then the flipside of that is the bureaucracy. Unfortunately, in a hospital setting, even though we're certified yoga therapists, it’s such a new field and with regard to the administration, there's a lot of red tape. When administrative medical professionals don't see the word “licensed” in front of yoga therapy…I’ll just say that there’s still some doubt about the profession, and mistrust, and need for more proof of efficacy. So when studies like ours are done, it’s incredibly important, because anytime you can cite a study it actually brings you that much closer to legitimacy in the eyes of the medical establishment.  Honestly, even to get our study approved took months and months and months, even though we had a bevy of cardiologists supporting it.

MG: That must have been frustrating.

SR: There is a lot of red tape, unfortunately. But our personal experience was always wonderful. Seeing the actual interaction between patients and doctors and nurses and staff on the floor was always fantastic.

MG: Did any of the study’s findings surprise you?

SR: In the upcoming Yoga Therapy for Cardiac Care course at PYI, we will study the Ayurvedic perspective of heart disease and how yoga therapy can address it.  We don’t have the time now to get into a discussion of the complexities of the Ayurvedic concept of doshas and how that relates to cardiac care,  but I can say that the extremely high-functioning, high energy people who would come into the room as patients in our cardiac yoga therapy study…it was often very surprising to me that they were so ready to embrace the practice of yoga and mediation. So one thing that I learned as a yoga therapist working with this population was how important it was to create that safe, sacred space wherever we were.  We would sometimes be in a beautiful room with a fireplace, and other times we would be in the auditorium and they would have to practice… I realized how important was to make the space as consistent and warm as possible, to create that impetus to relax and alter their energy to match the environment.  We tried to incorporate a spiritual element as well, with a singing bowl and playing music before we started, because yes, there was always a lot of energy coming into the room.

I think it was also the weight loss that was actually a surprise to me, as well, because we were doing very, very gentle chair yoga and meditation primarily. But 37.5% of participants lost weight. What the study was really geared toward was dealing with anxiety and depression. And there was a very significant decrease in that, as well. So that was really affirming. It went from a rating of seven to 4.9. 

MG: That's incredible.

SR: Yeah it really is, over a relatively short few months. So that was great. But the weight loss is what really surprised me. And I think part of what made that possible was that the women started to really look forward to coming.  It really became a community, a place where they started to really enjoy talking together and sharing their stories, and the outlook shifted from coming in as a patient and really identifying with their disease to being a part of a support group in a community that was doing healthy, uplifting activity together.  So I really think that we may have had a lot to do with improving other elements of their lives, not simply depression and anxiety but also just their outlook on life: “Hey, I'm going to make more of an effort to get better, because my life matters.”

MG: Speaking of lifestyle changes, are there cultural factors in the U.S. that you feel contribute to heart disease?

SR: Unfortunately, (heart disease) is on the rise and it's the largest killer in the world. And there are quite a few factors cultural factors that contribute. We are becoming less active as a whole. More and more people are waking up, going from their car to work, sitting all day at their job, and going back home and sitting in front of a television. So in general we're becoming less and less active and we don't even realize it. Second, the quality of our food, especially in this country, is just getting worse. There's more and more fast food, but also, even when someone does try to make an effort eat more healthfully, the quality of our meat, the quality of our dairy…and that healthier food is more expensive, all of these factors are truly contributing to declining heart health.

And then there’s a really big one, and it’s stress.  It’s the fact that people are having to work longer and longer hours with worsening health care. And the attendant anxiety this causes, as in,  “Well, I don't want to even go to the doctor because it's going to cost (too much).” There are many contributing factors.

On the bright side, one thing I think is a wonderful value of yoga therapy is that it encourages the client or patient to look at the whole picture of their health, and the more mindful a person becomes, the more they start to care about what they're eating and realize that moving feels good and your life can be strong and healthy. Empowering the agency in their physical form and yet making choices to practice more loving kindness and towards others also highly affects the heart. And this is what I'm very excited about regarding yoga therapy for cardiac care: that we get to bring together all these categories for a healthy life.

MG: Sonja, in your opinion, who is this Yoga For Cardiac Care training for?

SR: First of all, whether you are a personal trainer, a fitness instructor, a yoga teacher or really anyone who is dealing with a population working on their own health, you’re going to obtain such a knowledge base of how not only to recognize the signs and risks of heart disease but also what is effective. Which breathing techniques. Which asana. What languaging is helpful that they can implement and put into their work, whoever they are: acupuncturists, anyone in the wellness field.  And I’d also say that anyone who is supporting a family member or friend with heart disease or anyone who is at risk for heart disease.

MG:
Are there any ways, having worked with women in the study at Lenox Hill, that you think about gender and women when you are thinking about cardiac care in yoga therapy, in addition to how important it is to raise awareness among women about paying attention to their heart health?

SR: You need to have support networks, that is really important to awareness. Because the way heart disease presents in women can be very different from how it presents in men.  So that is number one.
And then I think for women it is really wonderful and important to empower each other. Because very often, for women, it’s easier for them to help a friend rather than to help themselves. So getting them all together allows them to all help one another. And then there is a greater chance that change will happen.

MG: I love that observation: I think that’s a point that should really be amplified. Sonja, I am so looking forward to taking your training, and thank you so much for your time.

SR: You’re very welcome. 

Prema Yoga Institute’s Yoga Therapy For Cardiac Care course, taught by Sonja Rzepski, runs from March 27th-29th at Pure Yoga West. Registration opens February 27th.

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Molly Goforth is a yoga and meditation teacher and a student at Prema Yoga Institute. She specializes in accessibility and trauma-informed yoga teaching and practice.