Hi Rachel
Yin is indeed becoming more and more popular and more and more often students coming to a Yin Yoga class have never done any yoga before. Your question is a good one and has inspired me to write a more in depth article on this topic for an upcoming newsletter. For now, maybe I can just offer a few points from my perspective and experience.
To say someone is a beginner at yoga is not all that helpful. There are beginners who are naturally very flexible and will have no problem doing the postures being described, but there are beginners who are very inflexible and will struggle with many poses. But there are also beginners who naturally very distracted mentally and will find it hard to stay present, and there are beginners who are very grounded and present and will have no problem with the mental requirements of a yoga practice. Students will have different combinations of these attributes: some will be flexible and grounded and these so-called beginners will have no problem with a yoga practice, while others will be inflexible and distracted and these students will benefit the most from yoga. It is this latter category that concerns teachers the most - should a student who is inflexible and unable to stay present start his/her yoga journey with Yin Yoga? That is the real question. The student who is grounded and flexible should have no problem even though she/he is new to yoga.
My answer is - yes. I believe that anyone can do a Yin Yoga practice, and in fact over the years I have come to believe that this is the ideal entry to yoga! This is a controversial position, as there are some teachers who believe that one to three years of regular Hatha practice should precede beginning a Yin practice (see Angie Ackerman’s
article for one example of this point of view.) Here is the biggest reason why I think that students not only can begin their yoga journey with Yin Yoga but
should begin their journey with Yin Yoga:
In Yin Yoga, the student is given the time and guidance needed to experience their body and the effect on their body that the postures create. With this training, they can develop their own sensitivity to what they need, when to go deeper and when to back off.
I believe that the greatest gift a teacher can give her students is the ability to know their own body/heart/mind and the ability to develop their own practice. Regular Hatha practice certainly can develop this skill, but when a student is holding a pose for only 5 or 8 breaths, there is only enough time to worry about the physical arrangement of the limbs. “Am I doing this right?” is a question that beginners often ask. The answer should be, “I don’t know … what are you feeling?” Each pose should have an intention behind it (why else would a teacher ask the student to do that pose?) and the student has to be the one to determine whether she is getting the intended benefit from that posture: this requires inner attention, and this is the great gift that you can help a beginner develop through a Yin Yoga practice.
As I say, I hope to offer more thoughts later. I hope this helps you welcome beginners to your classes, and help them to begin their yoga journey mindfully.
Cheers
Bernie