Sage Rountree

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...

Yoga teachers confess this to me all the time: three hours of planning for a sixty-minute class, and the class still comes out feeling random. The poses were fine. The pacing was fine. Something underneath it just didn’t hold.

After more than twenty years of teaching the same Monday night class, I can tell you what’s miss...

Some of the best yin teachers I know are loud, fast-talking vinyasa teachers. A soothing voice was never the qualification—the skill set is.

I hear this one over and over from yoga teachers: “I’d love to teach yin, but I’m not the yin type.” After two decades of training teachers, I want t...