Hi, my name is Shane. As both a yoga teacher and skateboarder, I’m really happy to share the practice of yin yoga with skaters. I’ve personally been transformed by it and can attest to its healing powers. So thanks to Skateism for hosting me for this series of Yin Yoga for Skateboarders. Together we will be releasing a series of videos that I create to specifically target areas of the body that are heavily used and abused during skateboarding and together maybe we can overcome the old stigma of skaters doing yoga.
Words and Practice by Shane Carrick
Photography by Abel Lannan
So let me introduce myself and the practice of yin yoga.
My back was hurting from skateboarding and snowboarding so my wife suggested going to yoga class. I had stupid preconceptions about yoga, so in my first class I opted for a Hot Weighted Vinyasa class – the most extreme I could find. I thought because I was a big, strong, manly guy, I’d do the heaviest weights available. A few minutes into the class, the sweaty struggle became too much and I made the walk of shame back to the front of the room and exchanged my weights for the tiny little pink ones and skulked back to my mat.
Luckily I found a different studio and a different teacher who offered a much slower and more healing and introspective type of yoga. I got hooked very quickly after that. A year or so later, my wife and I went to India to do a month long yoga teacher training at the Shiva Yoga Peeth Ashram in Rishikesh. The yoga worked, my life transformed. When we got home, we quit our jobs moved out of our place, put our things in storage and traveled the world for a year.
I was in Bali when I did my first Yin Yoga class. I fell in love with it immediately. My body and mind responded well to the stillness, space, silence and long-held postures. Physically it was very interesting as well; my body opened up more in two months of Yin than it had with years of more active forms of yoga like Vinyasa.
I started teaching yoga during my time in Bali and continued my Yin Yoga studies in Japan, London and Vancouver. A year later I started teaching full time in Colorado. Today I teach in Paris, France.
So what is yin yoga?
Yin Yoga is the dark-side of yoga – meaning slow, long held, static stretches down on the floor – held for 1 – 10 minutes. Yin has always been around. In the best known, most influential text on Hatha Yoga, the fifteenth-century Hathapradipika (Light on Hatha) – there are fifteen asanas (poses). Of those fifteen about half are seated postures that are meant to be held for a long time in a relaxed way.
Yin Yoga is about function rather than aesthetics. So the actual pose itself doesn’t matter. In fact, the poses are quite simple and all based upon natural human movement. The poses are done for a purpose and the purpose is not the pose.
How does yoga relate to skateboarding?
Put simply, I feel better than I did when I was 18 and I attribute that to my yoga practice. That’s just the physical aspect too. The other side of the coin is the path of introspection and figuring out how your mind is working. In fact, the mental aspect of yoga has yielded more fruit to me than the physical. We go so hard in our lives , it’s like we are cars speeding down the highway with our engines running hot. If there’s smoke billowing out of the exhaust, then with yoga we pull over, pop the hood, let things cool down so we can see what the problem is.
In the West, our model of health is: no need to take the car into the shop if it’s still running. It’s only when the car won’t start that we take it in to get fixed. Same with our bodies. Eastern models of medicine like Traditional Chinese Medicine (the lens through which we see the effects of yin yoga), are about seeking balance as a maintenance of optimal health. In the West: Ok you’re still breathing – OK you’re healthy. In the East health is about being in balance in all ways in order to be as fully alive as we can.
In this way, I see my yoga practice as a way to maintain myself. Our tissues tighten and dry up as we age. Yin yoga is able to effect changes in the tissues at a cellular level that make them thicker, stronger, more elastic and able to hold more water. There’s some really wonderful science around yoga these days – it’s super interesting what is actually happening inside your body during the poses.
Yoga is my yin and skateboarding is my yang – together I find balance.
We’ve all seen the yin-yang symbol before – maybe on someone’s tee shirt or a neck tattoo – but the actual meaning seems to be more elusive than its popularity suggests. The symbol comes from Taoism and represents the nature of all things. The idea is that all things, relative to one another are either yin or yang and are part of the two natural, complementary and contradictory forces in our universe. Both of the forces are different, but in the best way, they mutually complement each other.
Not only are these energies constantly moving and influencing each other, but they are each other; yin contains a bit of yang and yang contains a bit of yin. That’s what that little dot inside each half of the circle represents. The yin-yang aspects are in dynamic equilibrium. As one aspect declines, the other increases to an equal degree. All forces in the universe can be classified as yin or yang.
As a skateboarder, Yin Yoga will probably better serve you because you already have a very yang part of your life – if you’re like me, you need to balance that part out with Yin Yoga. In my opinion, skateboarders will be able to find balance more easily in a slow, soft form of yoga like Yin or Restorative rather than an active Vinyasa, Hot Yoga, or an “exercise” yoga class.
Advice for beginners:
I believe people will often shun yoga because of their perceived inflexibility and the blow to their ego as a result. People think that because they cannot touch their toes, they are somehow inadequate or abnormal. They view their bodies as a hindrance to their ability to “perform” yoga postures. Yoga is a self selecting practice – meaning that those who have the genetic and anatomical predisposition for yoga keep doing yoga and those that do not, quit.
Most people who do go to yoga attend the “hard” classes. Their egos won’t dare let them walk into a yin or gentle class. The biggest irony of this is that the “hard” classes are indeed hard and oftentimes only serve those who are already flexible or have a “yogi” body type. This means that the majority of people who even dare venture into a yoga class are turned off by the inaccessibility of the practice. Not everyone can do every pose so people either become disenchanted with the practice when their bodies fail to comply or they get hurt.
so:
- Try these videos a few times per week.
- Don’t do yoga before skateboarding.
- Pain is bad. (Avoid anything sensations that are sharp, burning, tingling, stabbing, etc.)
- Yoga is helpful but not a panacea.
- You don’t suck because you can’t do some poses – it doesn’t matter.
- Expect to get shit from your insecure skater friends.
- Be patient.
- Be still.
- Keep it up.
