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In recent times, as we discover ourselves continually searching for rest and regeneration, “restorative” yoga practices have turn into a fixture in lots of yoga classes. But there’s “restorative yoga” after which there’s “Restorative Yoga.”
There are two relatively passive movement styles which might be taught with the intent to offer rest: Yin and Restorative. Yin Yoga is characterised by coming right into a posture that stresses your body and remaining there for a somewhat prolonged time, whereas a Restorative Yoga posture supports you and your body within the effortless experience of prolonged rest. I often describe Yin Yoga as a series of WTF moments followed by Savasana, whereas in Restorative Yoga, I should be cajoled out of every posture.
They appear completely different, right? They’re. But I’ve taken many a Yin Yoga class that was called “Restorative Yoga” and vice versa. As a practitioner of each, this might be incredibly frustrating.
The confusion between these two practices, that are steadily lumped together under the label “restorative,” might be seen all over the place from YouTube videos to studio classes. While each promise restoration and lend themselves to a less performative way of practicing asana, each asks you to approach the poses completely otherwise. That is reflected in every part concerning the practice, including the pose names, the alignment, using props, the intention behind using physical stress versus creating emotional rest, and the length of time you linger in each.
It’s imperative for yoga teachers to call practices appropriately in order that students can reliably receive what they seek. And it’s equally relevant that students understand the difference between the 2 approaches so you may offer your body what it needs when it’s asking for it.
How, then, can we distinguish between these two useful sorts of yoga?
The difference between Yin Yoga and Restorative Yoga
The considerations behind each sort of yoga and their respective manners of approaching the poses are many.
1. Philosophy
Yin Yoga
Based on the wisdom of the ancients, every part is interconnected, including nature, our bodies, and our energy. This plays out in various belief systems across time and cultures, each of which experienced the world through the lens of nature’s moods.
In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), every part is expounded back to the five elements in nature: fire, water, earth, wood, and metal. Each element corresponds to a special season, and every season influences a special organ. In turn, the state of the physical body informs and influences energetic pathways within the body, known in TCM as meridians. Much like what South Asian texts describe as nadis, these channels determine where energy moves through us—or fails to achieve this.
Yin Yoga is predicated on this ancient East Asian belief system of eliciting energetic flow along specific meridian lines within the body. For instance, the role of the urinary bladder is to permit what isn’t useful to the body to flow out of us. The urinary bladder meridian does the identical thing with energy. With Yin Yoga, we will compress and stress the urinary bladder meridian in forward folds and backbends to release unhelpful energetic stuff held within the body.
We are able to definitely deal with Yin Yoga poses that stimulate an lively tune-up correlated to the time of yr, but we can even utilize our understanding of those energetic meridians to create flow each time and wherever we feel stuck.
Restorative Yoga
The concept of harmonizing energy within the body can also be a principle of Restorative Yoga, where it relates not only to balancing the energetic lines (nadis) and energetic centers (chakras) but in addition to pacifying the nervous system.
Judith Hanson Lasater is thought for popularizing Restorative Yoga. A disciple of BKS Iyengar, Lasater learned the Iyengar approach to using straps, blocks, bolsters, and chairs to assist students find alignment in lively postures. Lasater then adapted this idea to using props to support the body for rest.
While many assume that this sort of yoga is for practitioners who’re older or recovering from injury, Restorative Yoga has turn into recognized as a practice by students across all kinds of situations, and is increasingly included within the growing movement for yoga for social justice and community repair. In her book Restorative Yoga for Ethnic and Race-Based Stress and Trauma, Gail Parker suggests that Restorative Yoga is a needed balm to the harm attributable to a racialized society.
Students sometimes come upon Restorative Yoga and experience something they will’t truly name. It’s not sleeping, nevertheless it’s close. There’s an experience of ease within the body, mind, and spirit that we would find unfamiliar until we’re eventually in a position to name it as “rest.”
Restorative Yoga helps us discover a non-sleep state that permits us to take a seat with ourselves in uncompromised comfort, with some measure of freedom from thoughts, feelings, and body. Lasater defines this state as ashunya, the last and most elusive stage of Savasana. It’s a spot of profound rest where all thoughts go away and also you come out wondering, “What just happened? Where was I?!”
Restorative Yoga has the potential to bring a top quality of Savasana in every pose. As we go deeper and deeper into the practice, that ultimate state of leisure, ashunya, becomes more accessible.
2. Stress versus rest
Yin Yoga is a practice of resilience whereas Restorative Yoga rehearses rest.
Yin Yoga
Yin Yoga asks us to enter each pose while leaning into three principles: To take yourself to an appropriate edge, to seek out stillness there, and to stay in stillness for a time frame.
In a typical Yin Yoga practice, practitioners are guided into poses that load the joints and leverage gravity. Then they’re asked to feel into their Goldilocks position, which is where they experience a level of challenge they will sustain for 3-5 minutes in stillness.
We unintentionally stress joints any time we engage in movement. In Yin, the stress is intentional through sustained load on the joints as experienced through the lens of body awareness and student agency. Because of this, each Yin practitioner’s shape will look different not only from each other’s, but from their very own version of the identical pose in a more lively vinyasa, or yang, class.
Finding your edge doesn’t mean going to your end range of motion. It means going to a spot of challenge that is suitable on your body, mind, and spirit in that moment, which may look very otherwise on a high-stress day through which you is likely to be holding tension in your body versus an early-morning practice when nobody has yet gotten in your nerves.
Because we’re not pushing or pulling ourselves right into a pose in a Yin practice, the posture takes on a more relaxed shape regardless that much work is going on. We let go of all muscular engagement to receive the pose in stillness. Here, we may draw on our yoga tools and spot what is required to calm the mind stuff and stay on this pose. Is it more breath awareness? More softening?
In Yin, there may be a moment after we release the pose once we experience a visceral sensation of increased blood circulation and energetic flow coming back to the places that were being stressed. Paul Grilley, who founded Yin Yoga with Sarah Powers, describes this because the “rebound.”
Restorative Yoga
Whereas Yin Yoga embraces stressing joints, Restorative Yoga supports every aspect of the body in an try to relieve tension. In Restorative Yoga, props fill within the negative space under the body in order that it might rest in alignment.
In a typical one-hour Restorative Yoga practice, the practitioner is guided into two to 4 poses through which they’re invited to experience a top quality of Savasana in each pose. Blankets, bolsters, pillows, yoga blocks, and straps are used to prop the body for deep rest inside each posture.
The house practitioner has the additional benefit of using a chair, ottoman, or sofa for extra comfort in Restorative favorites reminiscent of a variation on Viparita Karani (Half Legs up the Wall together with your knees bent and calves supported) and Salamba Navasana (Restorative Boat or Supported Bridge Pose).
There are so few poses in a Restorative Yoga class since the practice involves allowing students to marinate in them, blissfully, for 10-20 minutes. (Some teachers allow less time in a pose, often because of the psychological discomfort many students experience in lingering that long in stillness.) If a pose isn’t blissful, you’re welcome to rest in one other shape until the subsequent pose. Student agency is paramount.
3. Alignment
Yin Yoga
In Yin Yoga, the same old rules of postural alignment are thrown out. We use what we learn about proper and protected alignment to get into each posture, but then we let go of all of those constructs. Rounded spines, knees barely bent, relaxed necks, and an overall give up to gravity inside the fundamental shape of every pose are acceptable in Yin. The truth is, they’re an integral a part of the practice.
Yin is a practice of introspection, interoception, and reception of the poses, not external statement or performance. For this reason, deep listening to yourself in an effort to find your version of the pose, one that matches your body, is the important practice itself.
Restorative Yoga
While we also practice give up in Restorative Yoga, it’s partly a give up to the props which might be holding and supporting us. This encourages a whole letting go of effort in addition to any thoughts and concept of time.
4. Time and temperature
Yin Yoga
In Yin Yoga, it’s common to remain in each pose for 3-5 minutes while bypassing muscular effort and stepping into the deeper connective tissues. Stiffer tissues—including the ligaments, joint capsules, and tendons—that are less compliant than muscles—slowly reply to the stress through lingering within the postures.
Yin is usually practiced in a non-heated room on a body that has not been exercising for a similar reason. The intention in Yin Yoga is to bypass the muscles being activated, so we arrange conditions accordingly. This can also be why Hanumanasana (Splits) might feel incredibly accessible in a heated room after dynamic movement, but tougher in a non-heated room without warming up. There is no such thing as a such thing as warming up of the fascia and ligaments, there is barely the time and patience it takes for them to turn into less stiff.
Bernie Clark, creator of The Complete Guide to Yin Yoga, describes this rationale through an understanding of “yin tissues” versus “yang tissues.” Yin tissues (think connective tissues reminiscent of fascia) are stiff and, subsequently, require more time to turn into pliable than yang tissues (think muscles). We spend minutes quite than seconds in Yin poses. A part of the educational process for those recent to Yin isn’t engaging their muscles, which allows the connective tissue to tackle the strain as a substitute. In Yin Yoga, Clark says, we allow “the stress to soak into the tissues.”
Restorative Yoga
Restorative Yoga offers a chance for the practitioner to rest and find ease in an environment curated for calm. Most poses last 10-20 minutes. Warmth helps to access calm, so blankets are used not only to prop the body but to cover up as body temperature tends to drop as we enter a more relaxed state.
5. Props
Yin Yoga
While it’s a standard belief that no props are required in Yin Yoga, that’s not necessarily true. Blocks, blankets, and bolsters can aid you create many shapes, including heart-opening and hip-opening poses. A strap can can help you access a top quality of containment—a sensation of being held without pushing or pulling—in addition to extension of the arms in order that rest in your upper body is feasible.
Restorative Yoga
In Restorative Yoga, we depend on props under any a part of the body needed to elicit rest. To that end, a part of the practice of Yin poses is to withstand resting in them. The target is to pay attention to the challenge of the pose and to develop tools of mental mastery to find a way to stay in that discomfort for time.
The function of each sorts of yoga
Whether it’s the pursuit of calm or resilience, each Yin and Restorative styles are designed to bring you right into a quieter state of body and mind. Lean into the murmurings of the voice inside you that asks for more softness, more stillness, more peace. Hearken to yourself. Hear what your body, mind, and spirit are telling you they need. Then watch how your nervous system appreciates you.
About our contributor
Tamika Caston-Miller, E-RYT 500, is the director of Ashé Yoga, where she curates yoga experiences and trainings in service of collective healing and community repair. Having begun her yoga journey in 2001 with a house practice, she now holds advanced certifications and training in Trauma-Informed Yoga, Somatics, Yin Yoga, Restorative Yoga, and Yoga Nidra. Tamika’s journey has been informed by chronic pain and injuries, social justice for QTBIPOC communities, the battle between shame and compassion and quest for ancestral healing, and the love for the practice and philosophy of yoga.