Interview With Sarah Powers
By Tim Noworyta
By Tim Noworyta
Do you find sitting for meditation uncomfortable and difficult? Do you feel that your asana practice is more concerned with achievement and "advancement" than with inner harmony and peace? Do you yearn for more balance and depth in both your practice and your life?
Well, you're not alone. In fact, it was a similar feeling that led Sarah Powers, now one of America's leading yoga teachers, to explore ways to achieve greater harmony in her body and to feel more at home in it when she sat for meditation. The result is what she calls Yin/Yang Yoga, which combines passive and active asanas into a very deep, integrated and satisfying practice.
When Sarah began teaching at California's Yoga Works in the 1980s, one of the other teachers there was Paul Grilley. He led classes in Yin Yoga, which he studied with a Taoist teacher named Pauly Fink and a Japanese yogi named Dr. Motoyama, a Shinto priest and an expert in Taoist medicine. (Paul's book, Taoist Yoga, can be ordered from grilley@earthlink.net.) Yin yoga uses long passive holds to work on the deeper and denser connective tissues of the body - the tendons, ligaments and cartilage that are difficult to energize and open. Sarah used to take Paul's class after her Ashtanga practice and liked the deepness of his approach. She began to look more into it.
The reason for her interest was the fact that despite intensive practice in Iyengar, Viniyoga and Ashtanga styles of yoga, Sarah was still not able to sit comfortably for long periods of time in meditation. While the active asana practice had increased her strength and flexibility - at least when she was warm - she found that she felt stiff after she cooled down. And when she meditated, she felt she was missing the experience of being able to sit still comfortably and rest deeply in the core of her body.
Reaching Deeper
As she studied Yin Yoga, Sarah learned that it had its greatest benefit when
practiced before a more active asana practice, not afterwards. That's
because a long passive hold of a pose when you're cold takes the work or
energy down to the deeper connective tissues of the joints and the meridian
system. By comparison, when we work actively, the pranic flow and
circulation is directed into the muscles and superficial connective tissues.
A long-held pose, practiced while the muscles are passive and before they
are warm, enables the deeper tissues with their corresponding meridian
pathways to be utilized and receive the pranic flow. This stimulates and
tones them, making them less dense and enabling them to stretch
appropriately, opening the joints and increasing the supply of fluids to
them.
As a result we become more flexible, our joints become "juicier" and energy blocks along the meridians are removed, enabling the organs to function better. And because the influx of prana works on the mind and nervous system too, we become not only more restful and peaceful but also more focused and clearer. For this reason, Sarah finds Yin practice part of an overall system for getting into stillness.
"If you never go into the deeper connective tissue," she says, "it becomes denser and less flexible - more Yin - making it more difficult to go deeper into asanas and more uncomfortable to sit in meditation. For me, the purpose of doing yoga is to feel more at home in my body. I'm interested in having harmony in my body and in enabling energy to flow freely through all channels, joints, muscles and organs. Yin yoga enables me to reach levels of myself I otherwise could not get to."
Pushing Your Edges
Sarah finds that the passive yin approach gives students a new edge to work
with in their yoga practice - the edge of just being in a pose without
trying to get anywhere in it. "Yin practice takes you deeper into where you
are, not out to where you think you should be," Sarah notes. "This approach
challenges you to rethink what asana is about. It marries meditation and
asana into a very deep practice. Some people, especially beginners, are not
interested in or willing to do this - to sit inside their discomfort and
just watch their reactions instead of trying to fix or change the pose. Yin
yoga challenges you to sit in the pure presence of awareness. It's hard in a
different way than active asana practice, but in a way that's more profound
and satisfying, as well as more beneficial to the deeper tissues."
This doesn't mean that Sarah has given up her active asana practice. In fact, she is continually working on deepening her "yang" practice, too. Her style combines the repetition and hold approach of the Viniyoga tradition, with the careful alignment and muscle action of Iyengar style yoga and the flow of Ashtanga vinyasa yoga. She finds both yin and yang practices are necessary to fully integrate and harmonize the body and mind - to enable us to feel fully at home in the body - and facilitate meditation.
For Sarah, life is a dance of both stillness and movement. "We learn how to be still, but we also have to utilize our muscles and express ourselves energetically," she says. "The goal is a sattvic balance of tamasic (passive) and rajasic (active) energies - a beautiful marriage of yang and yin, effort and surrender, ha and tha. The practice of Yin Yang Yoga helps us learn about stillness in movement and the flow in stillness."
Sarah finds that her yin practice has helped to facilitate and deepen her yang practice. "The ability to surrender that yin practice develops becomes deeply engrained in you and carries over into your yang practice," she says. "This keeps you from over-efforting and trying to push yourself into various poses, which increases the likelihood of injury. Plus, after yin practice, you find that there is already more energy flowing at deeper levels, so you are more flexible and require less warm-up. As a result, you go deeper with less effort."
Becoming Fully Integrated
In her classes and workshops, Sarah combines yin and yang practice with
meditation, because she finds that this produces the fullest integration of
the various dimensions of ourselves. The yin practice consists of
five-minute holds of various forward bends, back bends, hip openers and
twists, all done on the floor. During the holds, Sarah often talks about
various yogic philosophical principles or reads from poets on the sublime
nature of reality. The yang practice consists of a vinyasa flow that
includes repetitive movement and held poses. In a typical workshop, there
will be an hour of yin practice, two hours of yang practice, and an hour of
pranayama and meditation.
Sarah's meditation training has been primarily in the Buddhist traditions. She has sat on long retreats in both the U.S. and Asia. Most notably her primary teachers have been Jack Kornfield in the Vipassana tradition, Toni Packer in the open awareness of the Zen tradition, and the Tibetan teacher Tsoknyi Rinpoche in the Dzogchen path of effortless clarity. Buddhism has given her a clear map to the mind and helpful tools for getting into silence and stillness. She is also inspired by the teachings of Ramana Maharshi and Nisargadatta on Advaita Vedanta. She uses these tools in her workshops because she wants to share them with others and help them experience the power of stillness that she finds in Yin /Yang Yoga.
Sarah Powers will be in Chicago June 22 -24 to lead a Yin Yang Yoga workshop at the N.U. Yoga Center. For information, call 773-327-3650 or visit www.yogamind.com. For information about her other workshops and classes, visit www.sarahpowers.com.