Hitting a plateau?

Yoga Discussion General Yoga
#1

A few weeks ago I learned a bit about yin yoga and went quite at it one night.

It seems like that night’s progress is still with me more or less right now. And when I do my asanas it kind of feels like there is no where more to stretch.

Now I know this cannot be true, because I still very much can tell where I"m inflexible, it just seems that I’ve hit some super giant plateau though.

For instance in the “dangling” asana where your arms are around the elbows and you just hang there… I can now put the arms behind my legs and dangle them.

For plough, at first it is really hard to go into [only if i haven’t warmed up i’ve beeen doing plough for a year or so] but after a while it seems like I will be in it for maybe 5 minutes and there is not a lot of new stretching that happens>…

there’s a lot I need to do sure, I need to open my shoulders a lot, and I still need to be able to lower my heels all the way in down-dog, for sure

but my mind kind of says that “well you’re flexible enough” and what I want is to circulate prana now and activate chakras but

anyway does anyone know what I mean?

#2

Greetings.

Are you referring to Yin yoga or yin poses?
Yin yoga seems to be a sort of yoga engineered by Sarah Powers or Paul Grilley or both. I do not track such things so I do not “know”. But it is a title, never the less.

Yin yoga where the “Y” is lowercase and the poses themselves are yin in nature -that is calming, quieting, and nurturing - is a potentially different topic.

Relative to flexibilities and suppleness it is important to note that Yoga is just as much about stabilizing as it is about moving. Therefore in yoga we move some things and do not move some other things. As an example, if you will, when doing a seated twist it may be inappropriate to allow the twisting action to “go into” the sacrum or sacroiliac joint. Rather the pose may warrant keeping the sacrum stabile while twisting “elsewhere”.

I bring this up to emphasize that flexibility can be fools gold and more times than not it should not be used as a barometer of any sort whatsoever. It is not an evaluatory tool, a gauge, a measure, or a scale. It can be used by teachers but it is not required except in the instance of an assessment in a therapeutic context.

More critical to the Yoga practice itself is that the student can actually hone the awareness not just from class to class, pose to pose, but from breath to breath. So as long as you are feeling, bound and free, tight and lose, warm and cool, sharp and dull, then you are, in fact, on path.

Anatomically speaking “new stretching” means what? The level or degree of flexibility is not static, it is changing in every moment. The open groins in Baddha Konasana at 7:30 pm may be radically different then the groins at 9pm. There are a myriad of other factors including mood, diet, and lifestyle that figure in to “flexibility”.

Add to this that there is a limit to range of motion. So it is possible for a student to reach a point beyond which they should not or can no go. Is it this for you? Awareness my friend, awareness. You shall find out.

#3

It’s kind of like yin yoga. Some of the poses I do are yin and other from the 3 classes I have taken in the past (2 years history of taking classes)

my brain is scrambled right now for some reason so I don’t think I’ve read your reply very well.

I get what you say about it being a refinement of awareness, so that is helpful.

My biggest concern is about development of prana and liberation of chakras as well as improvement of mood, attaining joy and vitality, and fixing my posture.

i feel like most all of my chakras are spinning now and its a bit of a doozy. My crown was going nuts today shaking while I was reading the computer.