You said yes to covering the yin yoga class. Now you’re four and a half minutes into a five-minute hold, your students are folded over their bolsters, nobody has moved in a while, and a small question starts up at the back of your head: What the heck am I supposed to be doing right now?
Having a good answer to that question is the actual job of teaching yin, and almost nothing in a 200-hour training prepares you for it. Yin looks like the easiest class on the schedule—five to ten shapes in an hour, long holds, not much talking—which is exactly why it’s one of the harder styles to teach well. The silence that makes it restful for your students is the same silence in which you start to wonder whether you’re doing anything helpful at all.
You are. It just doesn’t look like work. Below is a full 60-minute yin yoga sequence, the one I built live with a room of yoga teachers in August, along with the checklist I built it against and the three things I say in every hold. Take the sequence and teach it. Then keep reading for what to do with the four and a half minutes.
In yin, time is the dial you don’t set
Every yoga class runs on three variables borrowed straight from exercise physiology: how often a shape shows up, how long you stay, and how hard it is. Frequency, duration, intensity. In a gentle class the frequency is high and the holds are short—think of pulsing side to side in a seated warmup, or cat and cow—and the intensity stays light. That’s what makes gentle yoga gentle.
Yin inverts it. Each shape shows up once, or once on each side, and the hold runs somewhere between two and six minutes. And the intensity is the one variable you don’t set at all: your students set it, and time carries it to them.
Paul Grilley, one of my yin yoga teachers, explains what time is doing by way of orthodontics, and I’ve never found a better way to say it. If you want to straighten your teeth, you don’t wiggle them hard and shove them where you want them to go. (Can you imagine?!?) You wear braces. You apply a very low grade of stress, held over a very long stretch of time, and the tissue reorganizes around it. Yin applies that same low-grade stress to fascia, ligaments, joint capsules, and bone—tissues that respond to time in a way they’ll never respond to force.
So how far in should a student go at the start, if time is the one doing the work?
Tension and compression, and why the same shape looks different on every mat
Here is the second idea I learned from Paul Grilley—and it improved my teaching in every style, not only yin. Your range in any shape is limited by one of two things: tension or compression.
Extend one arm straight out in front of you and feel the end of the motion at your elbow. That’s compression—bone meeting bone—and no amount of encouragement changes it. My left arm and my right arm stop at slightly different heights, because I broke my left elbow falling off a swing when I was 11 and it was surgically reconstructed. Now take an arm back behind you, and back again, and notice the stretch across your chest getting a little further each pass. That’s tension, and tension does change with time.
Every student in your room carries a different mix of the two in every shape you offer. Some of them are never ever ever getting their knees to the floor in cobbler pose, and it has nothing to do with effort—it depends on the shape of the femur and the depth of the hip socket.
So I stopped describing what a pose should look like and started describing where in the body it works. In sphinx I’ll say that we’re applying stress to the low back, opening across the front of the hips and the front of the chest, and that you may feel some compression in the low back by design. That gives a student a target instead of an image, and it lets every skeleton in the room be doing yoga correctly at the same time.
The 6–4–2 checklist, adapted for yin
The framework I build every class against is 6–4–2: six moves of the spine, four lines of the legs, two core actions. A checklist for balanced movement, not a pose-counting formula. If you want the long version, here is the 6–4–2 framework in full.
The six moves are the macronutrients of a balanced yin class: flexion, extension, side bending each way, and twisting each way. This is where a lot of yin classes go thin. Forward folding is comfortable to teach and comfortable to hold, so a yin class can drift into an hour of it, and students come out feeling a little discombobulated rather than well-rounded. There are good energetic reasons to teach a soothing forward-fold class on purpose. I just want it to be on purpose.
The four lines of the legs—front, back, inner, outer—work the same way in yin as anywhere else.
The two core actions are where I make one substitution. Stabilization and articulation are things I want in an active class, and they aren’t what yin yoga is for. So in the yin version of the recipe I swap in seasoning for the shoulders: cow face arms, eagle arms, a half bind, an arm overhead. Shoulders move in every direction, they take beautifully to a long hold, and switching the arm position is the easiest way to vary the same base sequence over a month while the deep structure stays put.
That’s the checklist. It isn’t a sequence. It tells me, when I look at my written lesson plan, what I’ve covered and what I’ve missed, and it never once tells me what to put in.
The 60-minute yin yoga sequence
The shape of this class is a palindrome. You travel out through one side, you take a symmetrical shape at the turn, and you come back through the other side in reverse. Students feel the symmetry even when they couldn’t put their finger on how you did it, and it gives you a built-in timing lever, which I’ll come back to.
Here are eleven shapes. Hold times get you to roughly 39 minutes; arrival, transitions, and settling fill the rest of the hour.
- Supported child’s pose, 3 minutes. Bolster lengthwise under the torso, a rolled blanket behind the knees if they want it. A symmetrical landing shape—your students are arriving from a car, not from a deep stretch. I don’t teach a separate centering in yin; going straight into the first shape buys you a pose or two.
- Sphinx, 3 minutes. Forearms down, or a bolster under the chest for a softer version. Extension, and a good counter to the fold you just came out of. Still symmetrical, on purpose—I stack the symmetrical shapes early.
- Side-lying banana, right, 3 minutes. Lower arm wrapped over the head, top arm in a half bind behind the back, which is cow face arms by another route. For a bigger side bend, come up onto a bolster with a block as a pillow. If side lying is awkward for someone, a supine banana works and the arms still apply.
- Dragon, right, 2 to 3 minutes. Blocks inside or outside the front foot. Dragon multitasks: front line of the back hip, back line of the front hip, inner and outer thigh all at once. Add a twist, or a side bend toward or away from the front leg. This is one of the more active yin shapes, so it gets a shorter hold than the rest.
- Shoelace, right, 3 to 4 minutes. Blanket under the sit bones, block under the top knee. Outer line of the hip, plus hip flexion if you fold forward. Shoelace is the most adaptable shape in the class—shoes tied tight, shoes tied loose, one leg extended for the half version, knee stacked over ankle for the open variation.
- Dragonfly, 5 minutes. The turn. Wide straddle, knees and toes wherever they land, because yin is not an alignment practice. Sit tall, lean back onto a prop, or fold forward onto bolsters; add a side bend or a twist or both. Inner and back lines of the legs.
- Shoelace, left, 3 to 4 minutes.
- Dragon, left, 2 to 3 minutes.
- Side-lying banana, left, 3 minutes. Mirror whatever you cued with the arms on the first side—write it down, so you remember.
- Supine twist, 2 to 3 minutes each side. Rotation both ways.
- Savasana or pentacle, 5 minutes or more.
Run the audit and you can see it’s balanced, rather than hoping it is: flexion in child’s pose, shoelace, and dragonfly; extension in sphinx; side bending both ways in banana; twisting both ways in the supine twists; front line in dragon, outer line in shoelace, inner and back in dragonfly; and shoulders in the banana arms. I know the class is covered because I checked, not because it felt finished.
The symmetrical shapes—child’s pose, sphinx, dragonfly, savasana—are your timing lever. They expand and collapse without anyone noticing, so if you’re running long you shorten the dragonfly, and if you have time in hand you lengthen it. Ending class on time is a form of respect: to students who have somewhere to be, to the studio that needs to turn the room around, and to the yoga teacher who has the next hour.
What to say: stress, settle, stay
Three things, every shape, every class.
Find the right degree of stress. What a student feels in the first 30 seconds isn’t the reality of the shape, because time is going to intensify it. So I ask for the barest edge—the first intimation that something is happening at all—and I promise an opportunity to go deeper at the halfway point. “Time is going to bring the intensity to you” does more work than any adjustment I could offer.
Settle. Once the edge is found, get still. Take your time finding a comfortable position, use any prop that helps you feel supported, and then look around your own body for places you’re bracing or holding. Those are the places a prop is waiting to do a job.
Stay. Two to six minutes, maybe more, and this is where you talk less rather than more. Halfway through, something like: you’re still here, but what’s changing? Are you at the right degree of stress now? You could back off, you could go deeper, you could change the height or the number of your props. Near the end, three more breaths, then a breath of silence.
Discomfort is normal in a long hold. Pain is not! Remind your students that a shooting or nervy sensation, or a leg going to sleep, is information to move on—and that coming out, shaking it off, and repositioning isn’t quitting! It’s the essence of a skillful practice of yin yoga.
The hard part isn’t the words
The hard part is trusting yourself to stop using more words.
When you feel the urge to say something, close your lips, part your teeth, take three slow breaths, and ask yourself WAIT: Why Am I Talking? If you don’t have an answer, you don’t need to be talking. And when you notice you’ve been going for a while, the question becomes WAIST: Why Am I Still Talking? In a yin room, silence is doing work your voice can’t do. Your students are having an experience, and they don’t need you narrating over it.
This is the part of teaching yin that no lesson plan hands you, and it’s also the part that makes a yoga teacher the one who gets asked back.
Teach it again next week
You now have a sequence you could teach tomorrow, which means the tempting move is to go find a different one for the week after. Don’t.
Teach this same base structure for a month and vary it on purpose: new arm positions in the banana, a twist added to dragon, a fold in the dragonfly one week and an upright dragonfly the next. The structure holds; the seasoning changes. Your students get to feel themselves progressing in a shape rather than meeting a new one every seven days, and you get to stop writing first drafts of lesson plans. If the whole idea of planning less makes you itchy, how to plan a yoga class in fifteen minutes is where I make the longer case.
One more piece of triage, for anyone who agreed to sub a yin class this week and is reading this at 9:00 p.m. the night before: take a balanced warmup from a class you already know and love, and teach it low and slow. That’s not the whole truth about yin, but it is true, and it will get you through Thursday.
What the plan can’t give you
You have the framework now, and the checklist, and a full class, and the three-part instruction. That part is yours to keep.
What’s still missing is getting in the reps. Eleven shapes times every variation times every body in your room is the craft of teaching yin yoga, and knowing which variation a particular student needs before she has to ask isn’t something a simple lesson plan can give you. I built my variation bank the way most of us do, by trial and error in front of paying students over a lot of years. It works! It’s just slow, and very public.
And knowledge is rarely the bottleneck. One of my mentorship members, Peggy, owned my book The Art of Yoga Sequencing and still spent 150 minutes planning each class until the mentorship brought it down to 45. What changed wasn’t more information. It was repetition, feedback, and someone watching her apply what she already knew.
Your next step
Start with the free guide: The 20-Minute Yin Sequence walks you through three yin shapes with the setup, the cue into each one, and exactly what to say and what to leave out. It’s short on purpose, and you can teach it this week.
If you want the framework behind the sequence rather than the sequence itself, how to teach yin yoga covers the whole approach in writing. And if you’re wondering where yin sits next to its neighbors, here’s the difference between gentle, yin, and restorative yoga.
When you want the whole system—a pose database with variations for every shape, a cueing swipe file for entering, holding, and exiting, done-for-you lesson plans, and 20 Yoga Alliance CEUs—that’s all in my course Fundamentals of Teaching Yin Yoga. Yin is a craft, not a personality type—you weren’t born to teach it, you learn it.
Go set a timer for four minutes this week, say almost nothing, and see what happens.
