Sage Rountree

Let’s answer the question first: no. Nobody is going to show up and check your papers before you teach a yin class. There’s no yin police, no governing body, no license that exists to revoke. If that sounds like permission to skip the work, keep reading, because the actual standard is more demanding than a certificate—it...

My husband took his first yin yoga class with me during a workshop I was teaching for athletes. Afterward, he told me I had the name wrong—it shouldn’t be called yin yoga, he said, it should be called win yoga, because the whole time he was in it, he kept wondering when it would be over.

I think about that class often, because an hour of doing almost nothing produce...

Julie McKay didn’t take a sabbatical to learn to teach yin. She didn’t wait for a slower season, and she didn’t clear her calendar. She’s a working yoga teacher who squeezed Teaching Yin Yoga into a full roster of classes and used what she learned the same week she learned it—which turns out to be exactly how the course is built to work.

“What do I even say during a five-minute hold?” is probably the question I hear most from teachers who avoid teaching yin. Here’s the actual answer: a word budget, a script skeleton, and permission to stop talking.

I walk through the whole system in the video above. If you’re still sorting out how yin differs from a gentle or a restorative class,

Most of us have suspected this since our first wide-legged forward fold, usually right as the morning light comes through the studio window at exactly the wrong angle: all yoga pants are see-through. Yours, mine, the expensive pair, the ones from the clearance bin. Put any of them under bright light, in a deep enough fold, and the fabric gives away a little more than we plann...