Yoga for Mental Health: Finding Softness, Strength, and Resilience Through Yin
This morning I stumbled on a page from one of my old yoga teacher notebooks. It was a list of prompts I often used in class to guide my students—specifically in my yin yoga classes, where patience, stillness, and discomfort are often some of the most challenging parts of the practice.
For those unfamiliar, yin yoga is a much slower, meditative style of yoga, in which deep stretches are held for several minutes at a time. It’s a counter to styles we might consider more yang—or active and powerful—such as vinyasa. But yin can also differentiate itself from other gentle styles like restorative yoga in that it doesn’t give us conditions that are inherently easier or more relaxing. It actually gives us quite challenging conditions we’re called to learn how to relax into.
In yin, students are often invited to find their “edge” in a stretch (not one that is painful, but one that may be uncomfortable). Over time, and through the cultivation of techniques like breath, attention, and surrender, practitioners often find they are able to embrace and soften into the initial discomfort, and find both deeper positions and greater peace and clarity as a result.
So what can this practice teach us from a therapeutic standpoint?
As one of my yoga teachers used to say: “How you show up on the mat is how you show up off the mat.”
When we practice tolerating, opening, and leaning into discomfort in yoga, we create and strengthen the neural pathways that allow us to do this elsewhere in our lives, such as when we encounter intense emotions, hard circumstances, or other challenging experiences.
In yoga we also learn to notice and become open and curious to that which arises in the moment - and believe me, in a practice with as much stillness as yin, a lot arises: anxiety, impatience, frustration, fear, grief, connection, insight, awe… But by staying with the experience in the present moment, we learn to “surf” or “ride the waves” of our thoughts and emotions, especially as we begin to learn the changing nature and impermanence of each.
And it turns out, these are classic and highly effective approaches to working with anxiety, panic, and even self-destructive urges through therapy, including are some of the most fundamental techniques used in popular models such as Acceptance and Commitment therapy (ACT), Mindfulness-Based Therapy, and Dialectical and Behavioral Therapy (DBT).
If you like the idea but don’t see yourself signing up specifically for yin yoga practice anytime soon, know that almost all forms of yoga offer similar benefits in different ways. In a hatha yoga class, you may be invited to hold a pose that requires a bit of strength for an extended period of time, or in a vinyasa class your endurance may be challenged while you’re asked to stay open, curious and soft in your response. The same goes for many forms of mindfulness meditation.
Even most forms of exercise like strength-training and cardio (really anywhere you are directly confronting a limit) can serve as a powerful practice to help train your mind to better handle difficulty. You’re not only training physical strength, stamina, and resilience, but mental strenth, stamina, and resilience, too.
That said, the biggest difference that yoga, meditation practices, and therapeutic models like ACT often provide is the mindfulness with which we more intentionally learn to approach these experiences. Rather than simply how to “push through” and “endure,” we learn to gentler responses such as to soften, let in, embrace or surrender. As mentioned previously, in practices that involve greater stillness, we also generally have more opportunity (and psychological safety) to directly confront thoughts, feelings or realities which we might otherwise attempt to avoid. So while grit and powering through certainly have their place, they’re also the strategies that tend to get a lot of my clients into trouble when there are no checks and balances on the other side 😉
At the end of the day, yoga helps us to observe and become aware of our default tendencies - when faced with difficulty, do we go straight to anger? anxiety? gripping? tightening? But even more, it also teaches us ways to relate and respond to our circumstances differently:
To be open when we want to resist
To relax when we want to tense
To be curious when we want to judge
To slow down when we want to bypass
To stay with when we want to run
To surrender when we want to fight
And each time we do, we build upon the neural architecture we have access to in future circumstances again. We quite literally stretch our minds as we stretch our bodies.
As one of my favorite quotes goes:
“We learn to be flexible so that when life gives us challenges, we bend but we don’t break.” - Unknown
Next time you’re met with discomfort, rather than resist, see if you can slow down and try to relax into it instead.
Take a deep inhale and literally breathe into the part causing distress.
You just might be surprised what can yield over just a little bit of time.