Yoga in Melbourne

Less is More: inside Melbourne’s Yin teacher trainings

“People leave classes thinking, what happened to me? Why was I crying? Why did I have this big release? And they want to understand why.”

Yin yoga is the practice where striving and achievement are left behind, to focus entirely on feeling and allowing. A handful of floor shapes, held for minutes at a time, propped and unhurried, working the deep tissue rather than the muscle, aimed less at effort than at what surfaces when effort stops. For years it lived at the edge of studio timetables, the quiet cousin of the sweatier styles. Not any more. Yin classes across Melbourne now fill, waitlist, and multiply, and the city’s teachers have started training other teachers to meet the demand.

It is worth pausing on how strange that is. The city sped back up after COVID, and the practice that grew fastest was the slowest one on the schedule.

“I found that the Yin space had grown massively,” says Alessia Frisina, who came to Yin from a strong Ashtanga background, pregnant during lockdown and needing a practice that matched what her body asked of her. “Which is a little bit counterintuitive, because one would think people wanted to move more. But actually I feel like people really wanted to come into connection with themselves, but in public spaces.”

That last phrase is the telling one. The rest people are seeking is not the rest of staying home, which most of us had in oversupply. It is rest in company, held by a teacher, surrounded by other people doing the same difficult, simple thing. Her teaching partner Janita Doelken watches the transformation happen in under an hour. “Observing people’s energy shift throughout class is my personal reminder that what we teach, the simple invitation to be in stillness, is needed more and more.”

Rayne Watkin, who teaches Yin and Yoga Nidra at Warrior One and Inndriya, was championing rest before rest was fashionable, pairing the two practices when that still needed explaining. “I think it’s what people need. It’s rest,” she says. “It’s gotten bigger than me. It’s in the collective consciousness now, showing how important it is.”

Ask her what Yin actually is, underneath the props and the long holds, and the answer is not anatomical. “Yin is like bringing the spirit into the body,” she says. “It’s coming into the present moment. It’s negating the past, the future, and really coming into this yoking of what is unfolding.” Everything a training adds on top, the touch, the sound, the poetry, the meridians, sits on that one simple embodied fact.

Four teachers, two trainings, one question underneath: when a practice this quiet becomes this popular, how is it passed on properly?

The whys

The Yin Path, the Yin Yoga teacher training Alessia and Janita run together at Grass Roots Yoga in St Kilda, wasn’t built from a business plan. While attending a ZenThai Shiatsu workshop, a bodywork practice combining Traditional Thai Massage, Shiatsu and Osteopathy, the two began to collaborate.

While both were offering Yin classes at various studios, they began to hold Yin and Intentional Touch events on a seasonal basis, combining Yin with ZenThai Shiatsu inspired touch. Something became very apparent. “People were leaving classes thinking, what happened to me? Why was I crying? Why did I have this big release? And they want to understand,” Alessia says. Anyone who has been ambushed by emotion in a long-held pose will recognise the moment she’s describing; Yin has a way of opening doors that were firmly shut. “A lot of these whys we answer during the teacher training. Of course, a lot of it is magic, it is. But there’s a lot we can uncover, the physiology, the anatomy of Yin, your nervous system.”

Their training teaches through the lens of Chinese medicine and the meridians, but its two most distinctive threads are things most yoga trainings don’t significantly feature. The first is intentional touch, used “in a way that can deepen the sensation and the experience of the body”. The second is language. A Yin class is mostly silence, which makes the few words a teacher does say carry unusual weight, and leaves the student alone with their own inner commentary for minutes at a stretch. “It’s important for students to have anchors,” Alessia says, “so the mind doesn’t just wander off. In The Yin Path we really want to help future teachers find their own voice.”

Rayne’s course, a 25-hour immersion at Warrior One, arrives at the same practice through a different avenue, and the difference is her biography. She is an osteopath of more than two decades, a bodyworker whose deep understanding of fascia and joints comes from a wealth of hands-on experience. This, combined with her years of Qigong practice, has allowed her to develop a course that delivers a comprehensive toolkit: Chinese medicine alongside anatomy, qigong, acupressure, and myofascial release with tune-up balls.

She is also refreshingly clear-eyed about the practice’s origins, in a field that often leans on its ancient lineages. “Yin yoga is not ancient. It’s quite a new concept,” she says. “But it umbrellas a lot of Indian energetics within it, and a lot of myofascial and anatomical conversations as well. So it’s got something for everyone in it.”

The honesty extends to the market she operates in. Yin trainings have proliferated as fast as Yin classes, and she knows it. “There’s a lot of yin courses now. It’s the teachers, at the end of the day, that make it unique. I add in qigong, I add in acupressure, but most of all I add in me.” This truth explains something about both of these trainings: neither is a franchise curriculum. They are two sets of teachers handing on their deepest understanding and their essential personal expressions.

Not just for teachers

Here is the detail that says the most about where Yin sits in Melbourne right now: a large share of the people signing up for teacher training have no intention of ever teaching.

The standard route into yoga teaching in Australia is a 200-hour foundation course, a serious undertaking of time and money. Nobody does one casually. But a 25- or 30-hour Yin training is a different proposition, and it has quietly become something else entirely: continuing education for the dedicated student. “A lot of people just come for their own personal interest,” Alessia says. “They really want to understand why it works.” The practice’s simplicity makes it unusually portable, needing no studio, no equipment beyond cushions, and very little space. “After a teacher training you can really be empowered to sequence for yourself, or your loved ones,” she says.

Janita plants that seed of self-sufficiency in every class she teaches, encouraging students to take the practice beyond the studio. She often leaves them with a simple reminder: “This is a shape you can do before bed to help you fall asleep. This is a shape you can do with your children.” In doing so, she gently reinforces that yoga isn’t something reserved for the mat, it’s a practice that can support everyday life.

Rayne’s cohorts run the same spectrum, wider still. “We have a lot of teachers that come in and do this course. And it’s also the lay person, we have the whole gamut. I have had mothers and sons, and mothers and daughters, come in. You don’t have to have done a lick of yoga training. None.”

Listen to these teachers long enough and a shared philosophy emerges. The point of the training, as they tell it, is to need your teacher less. Rayne says it most bluntly: “You shouldn’t be reliant on your teacher. The teacher should push it right back onto you. You take care of yourself. You’re your own guru.”

For the teachers in the room

For working yoga teachers, the case is more vocational. Studios increasingly programme Yin classes straight after Vinyasa classes and want one teacher to handle both. “They’re able to teach a double or a triple, which is very handy,” Alessia says. And because Yin looks simple, plenty of teachers take it on untrained. “A lot of people teach Yin because they think it’s simple, and it can be done untrained. But this is a way to understand the whys, not just copy someone else’s sequence.”

A Yin training also covers ground the 200-hour foundation rarely reaches. “Touch is not necessarily taught in the 200, because there is no time,” Alessia says. In Yin’s long holds, a teacher has time to really see what is going on in the room, to observe different ranges of motion, and time to actually help, with consent of course. “You begin to build a good eye.” And the effects ripple back into the faster styles in ways she has watched again and again: Yin unlocks range of motion for Vinyasa postures, and something subtler follows the teacher home. “You will always have an undertone of Yin after a Yin teacher training. Your Vinyasa classes become more spacious, less tiring for you to teach, and more effective for your students. It’s win-win-win.”

Rayne, asked what a Vinyasa teacher takes from her course, points inward rather than outward, which is very much her way. “It’s in the subtlety. We unpack the qualities of teaching, not as a direct conversation, but over the days. And I think they learn a lot more about themselves, actually.”

The course is built as a taste of the many ways awareness can be drawn into the practice rather than a single method, and for a teacher gone stale she frames that as permission. “Permission to not be too rigid, and to allow creativity to have a place within the experience of Yin. Yin in its nature is creative, it’s a feminine energy, it’s shakti.” It is also, she says, a rare chance for a teacher to receive rather than deliver. “A yin bliss bubble, to just allow yourself to be nurtured for a couple of days, and come away a little bit richer for having been there.”

Two trainings, two doors into a single practice. Either way, the destination is the one Melbourne seems collectively to be seeking: the ability to hold still, and to help others do the same.

Where to train