Yin yoga is a meditative style of yoga in which the postures are held for approximately three to five minutes. This approach is designed to increase flexibility by targeting the connective tissue, however, much like sex, this is not a time to space out. Instead, the three to five minutes are a physical and mental exercise of observing your “edge”.
Your edge is a liminal space where you feel enough sensation or discomfort to feel challenged, but there’s also enough comfort that you can maintain the posture for the duration of the hold. Your edge is not a specific shape or sensation, instead, your edge is fluid and is subjective to your current mindset, your diet, the time of day, previous injuries and so on. Your edge is your own!
Sex on the edge creates mind-altering, transformational, and life-affirming orgasms and yin yoga teaches you to surrender to the edge. This is why yin yoga is so effective at enhancing your sex life. It provides you with an arena, outside of an intimate, vulnerable setting, to practice playing with your edge.
Before we get started, familiarize yourself with ‘good pain’ and ‘bad pain’. The following principles of yin yoga, when practiced during sex, allow you to be present with the sensations of sex and to endure when sensations become intense so that you can experience mind-altering, transformational, and life-affirming orgasms. Now that you have this underlying knowledge, let’s take a closer look at one of the key ingredients of yin yoga and how this ingredient can enhance your sex life.
Week 1: Surrender
During your yin yoga class, practice surrendering to the posture, meaning surrender to the sensations, the thoughts, and emotions that occur. Practice surrendering to your edge, especially when it feels intense, without exiting the pose, fidgeting, or checking out with distracting thoughts. Do not try to control your thoughts or emotions. When sensations or emotions arise that are intense and you feel the desire to move, breathe and relax into your support, this can be your skeletal system, props, the floor, or even gravity. Resist the urge to fidget, meaning both physical and mental. Mental fidgeting manifests in rambling thoughts that consistently snowball and distract you from experiencing the present moment. When this happens, breathe and relax into your support.
Surrender, during yoga and sex, looks like relaxation. During yin yoga, practice relaxing into the posture so that there is little to no muscular activation. Instead, rely on the skeletal system, props, and gravity to hold you in the posture. There is always somewhere to soften (i.e. the eyes, jaw, hands, belly, genitals).
The principles of surrender in sex look very much like surrender during a yin class. Observe the sensations occurring in your body and where those sensations are occurring. Allow the sensation to occur, especially when it feels intense, this means you’re approaching your edge. Sex at the edge is mind-altering, transformational, and life-affirming. Keep going, breathe and relax into your support. Support during sex can look like your lover’s body, the bed, pillows, floor, or your own body. Unlike in yin yoga, where you will resist the temptation to fidget, during sex you will resist the temptation to control your motor functions. Allow your body to move, convulse, thrash, buck, etc. Allow for sounds as well, do not hold back if you want to scream, laugh, cry, talk, or moan.
To practice surrender in your yoga practice and increase your orgasmic potential, check out the accompanying 60-minute yin yoga class here.
Next week we will look at a second ingredient of yin yoga to better enhance your sex life.
-Nicole Berns