It took years for my spiritual relationship with vinyasa yoga to bloom. Like many others, it initiated as a physical practice to enjoy low impact exercise while my knee healed from an injury sustained during marathon training. My spiritual relationship with yin, however, was ripe from the beginning.
Yin Yoga is a slow-paced style of yoga as exercise, incorporating principles of Traditional Chinese Medicine, with asanas (postures) that are held for longer periods of time...Yin Yoga poses apply moderate stress to the connective tissues of the body—the tendons, fasciae, and ligaments—with the aim of increasing circulation in the joints and improving flexibility. A more meditative approach to yoga, its goals are awareness of inner silence, and bringing to light a universal, interconnecting quality. (Wikipedia, Yin Yoga)
When I first found yin yoga, I experienced states of frustration, followed by deep contemplation, which flowed into awareness, and ultimately, surrender of body and spirit. What I found most fascinating was that I could feel different stories in each tissue group, and even became of aware of the connection between the stories and between the tissue groups. This deepened my understanding of the aphorism your issues are in your tissues, but it also piqued a curiosity into how and why yin yoga transcends movement on a cellular level.
Fascia is the story of how we move; how we move is the story of how we live. While we often think of nourishment as nutrients from food, biomechanist Katy Bowman makes the case that, in the same way we need a complex variety of edible nutrients to thrive, we similarly need a complex variety of movements to optimise our health. This is not about eliminating certain foods or movements any more than it is about expressing too many of the same movements. For instance, neither sugar nor sitting are inherently bad. In fact, they both have value. But in excess, and without balance of other inputs, they can become problematic.
Through a process called mechanotransduction, cells respond to their physical movement by adjusting “to their structure and function accordingly” (Bowman). We see this with bunions, blisters, and atrophied muscles after a cast is removed. Often these inputs are overlooked, but there is a growing body of evidence to suggest that “mechanotransduction may contribute to the development of many diseases, including atherosclerosis, fibrosis, asthma, osteoporosis, heart failure, and cancer” (Wikipedia, Mechanotransduction). Other potential diseases may include glaucoma, irritable bowel syndrome, pelvic floor disorders, hemorrhoids, lymphedema, and sexual health dysfunction, among many others.
Bowman writes, “Trees are shaped by the wind...it is the movement of a tree, specifically the all-day, every-day stimulation created by wind, that dictates the girth of a tree’s trunk and branches as well as how often and at what angle a tree branches.”
Similarly, animals are shaped by their environment, which is particularly observable in animals that are in captivity, both in terms of the movements related to the short term adaptations of being in captivity, and the absence of movements they would experience in their native environment. She describes Flaccid Fin Syndrome (FFS), often observed in orcas in captivity. While in captivity, orcas swim only in a counter-clockwise circle, they only swim in shallow water and thus miss out on varying degrees of external pressure, consume an unnatural diet, and spend a greater time at the surface of the water than their roaming counterparts. For the orca, FFS is a case of missing a variety of natural movements, such as forward swimming, that would push the “passive tissues of the fin into an upright position,” and is also an excess of “single direction, tight-circle swimming.”
Culturally, it is very easy to attribute diseases to genetics. While this may be the case with many diseases, it is important to ask, are we as humans experiencing similar diseases of captivity? Do we see this in the form of deteriorated knees, dowager humps, misaligned gaits, tech neck, tight hamstrings, and collapsed arches? Whether through creation, evolution, or any other interpretation of our genesis, I struggle to believe that our birthright contains so much suffering. I believe our birthright is to feel at home in our bodies.
It may be jarring to think of humans as in captivity, given that free will is of high importance in Western culture. For the sake of this post, I am defining human captivity as living in a non-native environment in which, similarly to the orca, we are experiencing the absence of some movements and an excess of others. It is easier to understand this when we reflect on the timeline of humanity. In his masterful book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, historian Yuval Noah Harari iterates that the time we have existed since the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago is but the “blink of an eye compared to the thousands of years during which our ancestors hunted and gathered.” Following the cognitive revolution 70,000 years ago, humans roamed the earth as foragers for 60,000 years, living a life full of complex and varied nutritional and mechanical inputs. Meaning, for the majority of human history, we lived a radically different existence, and our species evolved and adapted to a life very different than the one the majority of us live today.
In addition to mechanical differences in how they lived, our predecessors “mastered...the internal world of their own bodies and senses. They listened to the slightest movement in the grass to learn whether a snake might be lurking there. They carefully observed the foliage of trees in order to discover fruits, beehives, and birds’ nests. They moved with a minimum of effort and noise, and knew how to sit, walk and run in the most agile and efficient manner. Varied and constant use of their bodies made them as fit as marathon runners. They had physical dexterity that people today are unable to achieve even after years of practicing yoga or t’ai chi” (Harari).
With radically different lives and movement patterns, our ancestors undoubtedly had a radically different fascia profile. It is unlikely they needed yin yoga. But, if our issues are in our tissues, does this mean that the hunter-gatherers did not hold on to or sustain psychosocial stories in their bodies?
One way to answer this question is to look at the Kalahari Bushman, the oldest continuous living hunter-gatherer society remaining.
The Bushman have only a thin veil between their physical and metaphysical body. Different energies, emotions, and experiences exist in the same realm as what we describe as tangible. And if an energy is sharp, it pierces your skin and is lodged in your body. Bushman doctors of the past referred to these as thorns, while today’s Bushman doctors refer to these as nails and arrows. To the Bushman, an emotional pain in the body is indistinguishable from the metal nail you would use to build a house. Keeney writes:
“Since anything sharp and pointed may pierce and cross the boundary of your skin, all these names of physical objects are used to refer to that which delivers either sickness or medicine...Anger makes your arrows dirty. The other two toxins that make them dirty are jealousy and selfishness. Be careful when you lose your temper, for it shoots a dirty arrow that can make someone sick. The same thing happens when you lose control of your jealousy or forget to share your wealth with others. All these things make people sick. When a feeling is intensified to such an extent that it feels real and solid, then it has become an arrow.” (Keeney)
Through listening to their body, the Kalahari Bushman manipulate their tissues through dance in complex and intentional techniques called Shaking Medicine. The aim of this is what Westerners would describe as fascia release, but the Bushman interpret this as healing, increasing empathy, transforming into animals, and cultivating states of transcendence.
In Sanskrit, the word granthi is a knot especially difficult to untie. In yoga, these are psychic knots, often in specific parts of our body and relating to a particular behavioral or metaphysical correlation. To the Rishis (great sages), they are knots, to the Bushman, they are nails.
It is a remarkable feeling when we release a lump in our throat, the knot in our stomach, or a weight on our shoulders. I often see, through our lives in captivity, that we are burdened with nails, arrows, and knots that many of us are unable to remove. It’s even more discouraging to learn how unaware of them we are. And I often wonder, how many of them are there because of movement deficits and how many because of energetic circumstances? My suspicion is that it is, and has always been, an interplay between the two. However, when we approach healing from a singular perspective as either energetic or mechanical, we diminish our capacity to self heal and lose an opportunity to increase our internal sensitivity.
For all of these reasons, I understand the practice of Yin Yoga, through an anthropological lens, as a practice similar to Shaking Medicine. While we may lack the mastery of the internal world and senses that Harari describes our ancestors as having, a sensitivity the Bushman likely still possess, we still experience the same complexity and drama of what it means to be human. While many practitioners may struggle to understand this as I do, I believe we still experience the same thorns, nails, and arrows in our bodies, and similarly benefit from some form of release, or as I prefer to think of it, healing.
References
Bowman, Katy. Move your DNA: Restore Your Natural health Through Natural Movement
Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Keeney, Bradford. The Bushman Way of Tracking God: The Original Spirituality of the Kalahari People
Wikipedia. Mechanobiology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanobiology
Wikipedia. Yin Yoga. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yin_Yoga