The Chris Abay Podcast S3:E7 — How Do You Practice Yoga When You Can’t Do The Poses?

What happens to your yoga practice when your body simply can't do the poses?

It's a question I was forced to confront following shoulder surgery.

Four weeks after surgery to repair my rotator cuff, my normal relationship with movement had been turned upside down. I couldn't load my arm. I couldn't practise the physical yoga I was accustomed to. Even sleeping normally was difficult.

And my instinct was exactly what you might expect from somebody who has spent much of his life moving:

I wanted to get better faster.

I wanted to return to the studio. I wanted to teach. I wanted to exercise.

My body had other ideas.

And somewhere in that enforced stillness, I began rediscovering something important:

Yoga doesn't disappear when you can't do the poses.

In some ways, that's when you begin discovering how much more there is to it.

When your body tells you to wait

One of the teachers at the studio said something to me during my recovery that stopped me in my tracks.

She reminded me that I'm constantly telling students in Yin Yoga that they have to give a posture time.

We settle into a position and wait.

Three minutes. Five minutes. Sometimes longer.

We don't demand that the body changes immediately.

And yet here I was expecting my own body to heal according to my preferred timetable.

She was right.

I couldn't rush it.

That lesson sits at the heart of Yin Yoga, but it also extends far beyond a Yin pose.

Sometimes the practice is not doing more.

Sometimes the practice is allowing enough time for something to happen.

Yoga without movement

Unable to practise much physical yoga, three other practices became increasingly important to me:

Meditation.
Breathwork.
Yoga Nidra.

None required me to perform a difficult posture.

None required strength or flexibility.

Yet they began to make my experience of recovery feel profoundly different.

It reminded me that we've come to associate the word yoga so strongly with physical poses that it's easy to forget how small a part of the wider tradition those poses actually represent.

Take away the poses and yoga is still there.

Meditation: creating time rather than using it

During recovery I began meditating for around half an hour in the morning.

Something interesting happened.

Previously, meditation could sometimes feel like another thing competing for my time.

“I'm too busy to meditate today.”

But I began noticing that the days when I didn't meditate were often the days that felt most crowded and unproductive.

The days when I did meditate felt different.

There was space.

It didn't seem as though meditation was taking time away from my day.

It felt as though it was giving time back to me.

The day had a spacious quality.

By contrast, when I allowed myself to become immediately absorbed by my laptop, the website, writing and everything else demanding my attention, the day could dissolve into a kind of meaningless buzz.

Meditation became a buffer between me and that busyness.

And that experience has changed the way I think about stillness.

Breathwork: discovering what happens when we slow down

Recovery also gave me an opportunity to explore my breathing more deeply.

I've always been built for movement. Suddenly I was spending long periods sitting in an armchair or on the edge of my bed.

So I started experimenting with very slow breathing.

Rather than using rapid or highly stimulating breathing practices, I became interested in the opposite:

What happens when the breath becomes quieter, slower and more controlled?

I experimented with long nasal inhalations, gentle breath retention — kumbhaka in yogic breathing — followed by long, controlled exhalations and another comfortable pause.

The important word here is comfortable.

This wasn't about creating a competition to see how long I could hold my breath.

It was an exploration of how slowing my breathing affected my internal state.

And the effect I experienced was striking.

A long, controlled exhalation seemed to send a very simple message through my body:

It's okay. You're safe. You can soften.

That is an interesting place for breathwork and Yin Yoga to meet.

From fight-or-flight towards rest

Breathing and the nervous system are closely connected.

When we're frightened or under pressure, breathing commonly becomes faster and less controlled. Conversely, slower breathing practices can influence autonomic regulation and help create a calmer physiological state.

For me, that mattered enormously during recovery.

My body had already experienced the physical stress of surgery. I didn't need to turn recovery into another athletic challenge.

I needed conditions that supported rest.

So rather than asking:

“How can I push my recovery forward?”

I became increasingly interested in:

“How can I create an environment in which recovery is allowed to happen?”

That's a very Yin question.

Yoga Nidra: practising awareness without movement

The third practice became Yoga Nidra.

At night I would listen to a guided Yoga Nidra practice in darkness.

The teacher would gradually rotate my awareness through different areas of the body:

the forehead, eyes, ears, throat, shoulder, elbow, hands and onwards.

There is virtually no physical movement involved.

Yet your attention is moving continuously.

You begin noticing areas of your body that you might barely acknowledge during an ordinary day.

For me, this became another way of inhabiting my body during a period when I couldn't use it in the way I normally would.

Rather than demanding movement from my body, I could simply pay attention to it.

And perhaps that's one of the most useful ways of understanding Yoga Nidra.

The body becomes still while awareness continues its journey.

So where are the yoga poses?

This is where my recovery unexpectedly brought me back to Yin Yoga.

At the time I recorded this episode, I couldn't properly practise Yin.

Yet I realised I was practising many of its inner mechanisms every day.

In a Yin pose we find an appropriate position.

We settle.

We become still.

And eventually we're left with the contents of the mind, the breath and the sensations of the body.

Meditation was teaching me stillness.

Breathwork was teaching me regulation.

Yoga Nidra was teaching me awareness.

None required an impressive yoga pose.

And yet all three were bringing me deeper into yoga.

Yoga is bigger than asana

This became particularly significant for me because my own yoga history had been extremely physical.

Before yoga there had been karate, dancing and the gym.

Then came stronger physical yoga practices.

Hatha. Vinyasa. Power Yoga. Hot Yoga.

Those practices have enormous value, and I'm certainly not suggesting that we should abandon physical yoga or strength.

But bodies change.

Mine certainly has.

And eventually I found myself confronting a question that perhaps comes to many long-term practitioners:

What happens when the body that originally brought you into yoga is no longer capable of practising in exactly the same way?

My answer is increasingly:

The yoga evolves with you.

From AbaYoga towards YinWave

That realisation is also part of the reason my teaching and studio have been evolving from AbaYoga towards YinWave.

AbaYoga reflected an earlier stage of my own practice — one heavily influenced by physical and more Yang forms of yoga.

YinWave represents where that journey is taking me now.

Not the rejection of movement.

The balancing of movement.

Yin Yoga.
Myofascial Release.
Meditation.
Breathwork.
Yoga Nidra.
Sound and Gong.

These practices increasingly feel less like separate techniques and more like different doors into the same room.

They ask us to notice rather than simply perform.

When injury changes the direction

I've had surgery before.

Years ago I had surgery on my hand, and perhaps my body was already trying to teach me something.

I didn't really listen.

I battled on.

Seven years later came shoulder surgery.

Perhaps one of the uncomfortable truths of ageing is that the body eventually becomes impossible to ignore.

That doesn't mean becoming passive or giving up physical strength.

Quite the opposite.

But it may mean recognising that more isn't always better and harder isn't always wiser.

Sometimes injury redirects us.

Sometimes the practice we temporarily lose reveals another practice that we hadn't previously valued enough.

How do you practise yoga when you can't do the poses?

You breathe.

You meditate.

You practise Yoga Nidra.

You notice sensation.

You explore stillness.

You allow your nervous system to settle.

You pay attention.

And eventually, when your body is ready, perhaps you begin moving again.

That's what this period of recovery has taught me.

Yoga isn't something my body can prevent me from doing.

The poses are one expression of the practice.

Take them away and something deeper remains.

And perhaps that's where the most interesting part of yoga begins.

The Chris Abay Podcast explores Yin Yoga, Myofascial Release, Yoga Nidra, breathwork, therapeutic movement and the evolving philosophy behind YinWave.com